CEO and Harpoon Brewery founder Rich Doyle shared his marketing plans at the February 14th breakfast at the Association for Corporate Growth/Boston. Plans include:
- Aggressively promoting his new Boston beer garden and restaurant both for the general public and for private groups, with a focus on trying to identify Harpoon Brewery with the Boston experience. He expects 200,000 visitors in the Boston Brewery in the next year; their Brewery in Vermont, at the old Catamount facility, also draws about 10,000 visitors a month.
- Use of social media; the company has hired a new director of digital marketing and his task is to replace an email approach with a Twitter/Facebook approach.
- Beer Fests: started around 1990, a low point in the company history where they were down to five employees, Beer Fest each year now attracts about 18,000 visitors.
- Local involvement in charitable events and clean-up drives, with respect to which the company reaches out to its consumer base for volunteer participants.
- Publicity within the consumer base, which is organized by, and communicated with by reference to, zip codes.
Harpoon is the only Boston based and Boston manufactured craft beer. Craft beers make up about 6% of the United States market and Harpoon claims to be the eighth largest among these smaller brewers. With sales about $50,000,000 last year, Harpoon distributes through 26 states as far West as Texas; its growth plans do not include making significant changes in either their product line or their geographic distribution, as they see ample growth opportunities within their existing markets and product lines.
One interesting fact for beer drinkers: while bottles for craft beer presently are and will remain far more significant than aluminum cans, Doyle anticipates growth in canned distribution because cans are more mobile, and furthermore are more popular in the South than in the North.
Doyle is a reformed New York investment banker who got the idea to start a brewery by writing a brewery business plan as part of his MBA requirement. Throughout his presentation, he took long drinks – from a water bottle. But then again, it was a breakfast meeting.