Malt Shovel Garage Brand Strategy

Malt Shovel Garage

Driving growth by being meaningfully different

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The challenge

When pubs and bars were forced to close due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lion faced a significant sales challenge for their Malt Shovel craft beer portfolio. They needed to find a way to connect directly with their audience and drive sales through a craft beer e-commerce platform.

With existing beer e-commerce platforms already saturating the market, Lion needed to create something truly unique from scratch.

The science

Building the brand strategy and identity, the goal was to not only stand out but also to drive a meaningful difference. Research has shown that brands with meaningful differentiation experience accelerated growth.

Understanding the functional and emotional needs of the audience, we realised that existing craft beer e-commerce platforms were primarily transactional and our craft beer drinkers wanted more. They wanted to buy into the culture of craft beer, not just the products.

Thus, the proposition of “go beyond the beer” was born.

The art

Enter the Malt Shovel Craft Beer Garage, where the virtual world meets real-life brewery experiences.

With a focus on injecting personality and warmth into the category, we put our passionate beer crew at the heart of our story-telling, using them as the key characters to create emotive content that both inspired and entertained.

Craft beer enthusiasts could now get up close and personal with the brewers, dive into the stories and people behind breweries and immerse themselves in the craft beer culture to ‘go beyond the beer’ and discover the world of craft like never before.

The evidence

By going beyond a transactional approach and developing a clear, relevant meaningful difference, the ecommerce platform strongly resonated with craft beer enthusiasts, providing an immersive experience.

Lion successfully transformed the challenges of the pandemic into an opportunity to create a unique and engaging digital experience driving sales at a critical time to keep smaller craft breweries selling.