What the Brewdog scandal teaches us about branding our projects

I only started drinking when I turned 30. It was my birthday, my wife and I were at a festival, and we decided that we would celebrate with a glass of wine. It was horrible! After being teetotal for most of my life, my tastebuds were just not used to the tannin rich flavours.

Since then, I have discovered that a pint of pale ale with a meal, or over a football game, is about my limit. For this reason, I have really enjoyed local microbreweries and craft ales. I stumbled across Brewdog early in this learning process, and like most people I thought they were a small, local business, with that artisan hipster vibe that I tend to be drawn to.

I was wrong.

I first heard of issues with Brewdog early last year. Reports said they were effectively ripping off other small brands, undercutting genuine local businesses, and entering into all kinds of silly copyright claims over words like ‘punk’. This week more has come to light about the toxicity of the work environment, and something almost like virtue signalling in its approach to brand identity.

Put another way, they like to look like something rather than actually being something. They’re trying to look small-bespoke-hipster to sell to people like me, but they’re hiding a massively corporate body under their whitewashed brand.

Youth work identity branding

Youth workers, we can be so guilty of this. In our passion to appear relevant to pockets of ‘Gen Z’ we often dress up in cultural clothing rather than actually truly cultivating culture.

In our passion to find the right fonts to use, the right brand name to dress up, the right clothing to wear, the right boxsets to reference, and the right language to speak, we can very easily create a Brewdog-style façade, hiding our true selves and true intentions underneath.

This creates a serious disconnect and is one of the main reasons that we run clubs rather than grow community.

The basis of this is classically attractional ministry. We dress a project up in a way that we think would appeal to broad masses of young people. We look at generational trends, evaluate popular TV shows, examine how young people are spending their time, and we build a project brand around those ideas in the hope it will attract young people.

At one level there’s nothing wrong with these things, as long as they flow naturally out of the community of young people that we’re directly working with. However as so much of our work is intrinsically geared towards attracting new people (rather than developing long-term healthy relationships with just a small nucleus) we tend to put this brand cart before the horse.

Looking like or truly being?

The issue then is, unlike the culture it emanates from, we develop this identity in a vacuum from real people. This means that no matter how ‘on trend’ our project looks, it will always have a serious disconnect with the people that we’re trying to embrace. It will always be in some way fake, false, phoney, fraudulent, and foundationally bankrupt. Sorry!

I think this is a symptom of a fundamentally broken youth work model. Youth work has a habit of trying to look like something rather than genuinely being something. Let me say that again because I think that’s the heartbeat of what I’m trying to get across here: youth work has a habit of trying to look like something rather than genuinely being something.

Relationships create culture, and culture drives community. A healthy project is one that is built in this direction, and in this order. Starting instead with an attractional brand idea which is essentially disconnected from actual people, will always be inauthentic.

So how should we do it?

• We start with the nucleus of just a few young people.
• We connect deeply with them building healthy relationships and facilitating healthy communication among them.
• This begins to manifest as its own specific culture.
• The culture then cultivates community.

Put another way, do it first, name it later! Live it first, brand it later! Grow it first, label it later!

Let’s not Brewdog this thing anymore. They got caught, so will we. Young people can smell a rat. They have authentic radar! So, let’s just not fake it to begin with.

Peace.

Photo by Eeshan Garg on Unsplash