Hopped Up: Brroklyn Brewery discovers DM to reach consumers

One good way to help build a relationship is to buy someone a beer. One very good way to help build relationships with those beer buyers is direct marketing.

A quirky microbrewery tucked into an unstylish, working-class section of Brooklyn, NY is spilling beyond its original recipe of marketing to wholesalers to do just that. For the first time this fall, Brooklyn Brewery began reaching out to retail customers through direct mail and e-mail. And while it’s starting out slowly, the brewery – which manufacturers 11 beers ranging from the summer brew East India Pale ale to the heartier Black Chocolate Stout (Monster Ale 2000) – will soon increase and refine its DM efforts, thanks to the hiring of a database manager.

In mid-September, president Stephen Hindy and his partner, CEO Tom Potter, dropped a 1,000-piece mailing advertising October events to people who visited the brewery for Friday night happy hours or Saturday afternoon tours and signed the guest book, or visitors to its annual Beer Fest.

This was the first time Hindy mailed to retail customers, but his instincts were on target. He sent to recent names only, just those collected in the last six months from BB’s 5,000-name list. Although the brewery distributes throughout the East Coast, Hindy mailed only to people within easy travelling distance from the brewery. Plus, he figured Brooklyn Beer fans who had already attended a brewery event were the most promising recipients.

Indeed, it’s almost as though these visitors are begging for communications. Of the 5,000 who partook in the 150-beer sampling bash at the Beer Fest, for example, some 1,000 signed a guest book entering a raffle for a case of beer, turning over their name, home address and e-mail address.

“We’re going to try to make these people into repeat customers of the beer through direct mail,” Hindy says.

The mailing piece was low-key and straightforward – an 8-1/2-by-11-inch sheet announcing the brewery’s Halloween party and a beer-tasting and buffet led by Michael Jackson, a renowned craft beer expert and author. A full-color postcard, slipped into the envelope, invited folks to the Oktoberfiesta (a Latin-flavored Oktoberfest). The postcard was also distributed to area restaurants and bars that stock Brooklyn Beer.

The e-mailing – with text identical to the snail mailing – went to 150 e-mail addresses culled from the customer file of the Brooklyn Store (www. brooklynbrewery. com), an online catalog carrying T-shirts, caps and glasses.

>From both mailings, Hindy received over three dozen RSVPs. But other than >the fact that these callers plan to attend an October event, Hindy found >out nothing more about who responded and why – a situation the database >manager was hired to remedy.

Although Hindy sends out monthly mailings to his wholesale customers – 1,500 in New York City alone – keeping them abreast of special deals, products and events, since founding BB in 1987, he’s marketed primarily through public relations, relying on a pillar of DM: having a good tale to tell.

He perfected the craft of storytelling under fire – often literally – as a Mideast correspondent for Associated Press in the early 1980s. He covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war and the Israeli-Lebanese conflicts.

The job could be terrifying. In 1981, he was sitting in the bleachers behind Egyptian President Anwar Sadat when the statesman was assassinated. Hindy was abducted by an Israeli-supported militia. The people with him – a group of United Nations peacekeepers – were tortured and killed; Hindy was released after a few hours.

Still, Hindy would have stayed on had his wife not threatened to move back home without him.

“It’s a very alluring kind of life,” Hindy reflects. “But I looked around and there weren’t too many foreign correspondents over 40 who I’d want to be.”

Settled in Brooklyn, working as an assistant foreign editor for Newsday, Hindy hung out on weekends experimenting with the home-brewing kit his AP colleagues had bestowed as a going-away gift. Bitten by the suds bug, he began talking up the idea of a beer-brewing business with Potter, his upstairs neighbor, who has an MBA from Columbia.

A Lexis/Nexis search turned up a pile of stories about microbreweries thriving on the West Coast. He told Potter: “This is going to happen in New York and we should do it.”

Hindy persuaded Potter, then a banker, to attend a microbreweries conference in Portland, OR. There, “he met all the moversand shakers and came back impressed that there were serious business people there,” Hindy says. “He was convinced.”

Seeking investors, Potter did the numbers and Hindy wrote the business plan, his skills as a journalist in full play. Hindy notes: “When we were looking for investors, I think my ability to sell myself to people helped. There were some of our investors who said, if you got through all that crap in Lebanon and in Cairo, you can start a brewery.”

The minimum they needed to launch was $300,000, which they hit a week before the 1987 stock market crash. In all, they raised half a million dollars from friends and relatives: “The most amazing part of our story,” he says.

Brooklyn Brewery arrived on the cusp of a movement. In the mid-’80s, there were 44 brewing concerns in the United States; now there are more than 1,000. Still, it took awhile for Hindy and Potter to secure themselves in the black.

Comparing the risks of his two careers, Hindy says, “In a way, starting a company is much more frightening. We put all our own money into it. We had young kids and had quit our day jobs.”

For years, the company contracted with a brewery in Ithaca, NY because they couldn’t afford to brew their own. The turning point came in 1991, when the entrepreneurs opened a distributorship. Today, they operate the biggest craft-beer distributorship in the nation, delivering more than a dozen U.S. microbrews and a number of European labels to 800 restaurants and retail outlets from Boston to North Carolina.

The distributorship enabled the partners to found the microbrewery in 1996. New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani was there on opening day pouring beer for the press.

Currently, company growth hovers around 28%. Plus, the 2-year-old Web site is expected to pull in revenue of $150,000 by the end of the year, Hindy claims.

Customer service is key to continued growth, says Hindy, pointing out that he addresses wholesale customers’ problems and questions directly by telephone and e-mail. Monthly brewery events and community service help instill loyalty. The establishment wants to be of the people – offering its space as a meeting place for neighborhood mothers who want to found a public school – and is donating part of the proceeds of the Jackson beer-tasting to a scholarship fund for aspiring brewmasters.

These tactics, he says, will also work with retail customers. So will the company’s marketing naivete.

“As we market our company, we have to be sensitive to the concern that our customers will interpret very slick Madison Avenue marketing as a kind of betrayal of who we are,” Hindy maintains. “I think that direct marketing through e-mail and special events helps us stay true to our original purpose and means of communicating – which is really word of mouth. We’re trying to shape this body of customers that we have out there that likes us and wants to know more about us. We’re trying to make customers one at a time.”