A Case of Beer: Branding Brews and Sense of Place

Will sing for beer.

Now here's a sense of place study I can really get behind!

Published in the Journal of Marketing Management (paywalled) just this month, Leveraging the side of the brand using a sense of place: Case studies in craft breweries, authors Hede and Watne investigate craft brew branding strategies that attempt to connect consumers to place through the bridge of beer.

Academic articles like this are often only available to paying costumers or to students whose institutions pay for such access. It's a huge money-making market that doesn't actually pay the authors and keeps most scientific research out of the hands of everyday people. But that's a different debate.

A short description of the beer branding study, the abstract, is provided by the journal:  

In order for consumers to connect emotionally with brands, brands must be transformed from inanimate entities into the realm of acquiring human characteristics. Following a review of more than 1000 breweries from online sources and beer companion books, we explore how a sense of place, derived from myths, folklores, and heroes, enables marketers and consumers to co-create narratives that humanise brands. We add to the theory on brand humanisation as we conclude that a sense of place offers a novel, and different, approach to humanisation strategies based on anthropomorphisation, personification, and user imagery, but can also operate in tandem with them. Further research is recommended to understand how and why consumers respond to branding strategies that use a sense of place to humanise brands.