The branding geography of Surrey craft breweries

The craft beer industry has effectively leveraged the consumption trend of localism as an expedient and pragmatic competitive position against established and once nearly omnipotent national and international Big Beer brands able to benefit from production and marketing economies of scale. A key differentiator for smaller scale beer producers is their agility in developing new batches of products and bringing them to market, presenting an interesting and highly dynamic brandscape to study. Not unsurprisingly therefore, beer product branding often draws its inspiration from ‘local’ utilising ideas from history, humour, myths and stories, ingredients and, of course, tangible physical and intangible socio-political geography.

This chapter will seek to review the beer label brand architecture of craft breweries in the UK county of Surrey. It will examine the craft brewer use of names (brewery and beers) and naming associations (signs and symbols) embedded in their graphical identities and contrast findings against the top selling UK beer brands. This visual content analysis based research aims to better understand the pervasiveness of local geography in Surrey craft beer brands.