Best Thing In The Tent

The most effective marketing loop I know has three moves. Connection, story, connection. Somebody you know pulls you in. A story worth carrying gets handed to you. And the story is good enough that you grab somebody else by the sleeve. No ad spend anywhere in the loop. No funnel diagram survives contact with it.

I watched the whole thing run, start to finish, in about ninety seconds at Great Taste of the Midwest.

Great Taste is the kind of festival where choice becomes a weather condition. Hundreds of breweries, thousands of pours, and a park full of people slowly discovering that four-ounce samples still add up. Nobody walks that grass with a strategy. You drift. Which is why the first move matters so much: I didn’t drift to the Titletown tent. I walked there on purpose, because a guy I know was pouring. Not just a guy I know. He taught me when I was studying for my Cicerone. He knows what I know about beer, because a chunk of what I know about beer used to be his.

He handed me their West Coast IPA. Then he handed me the part that made it heavy: he’d been at the brewery three years, and this was the first recipe that was his. Three years of other people’s beers. Three years of showing up, cleaning what needed cleaning, pouring what needed pouring. Then the brewery said yes, and the yes was sitting in my cup, cold and bitter the way a West Coast is bitter, which is to say on purpose.

I did not stand there evaluating hop character. I turned around, found the friend I’d brought, and made him try it. Not “this is a good IPA.” That sentence has never moved a human being one inch across a festival ground. What came out of me was closer to: you have to taste this, the guy who taught me beer works here now, and this is the first one they let him make. Three years he waited.

Loop closed. Connection, story, connection.

Notice what the story wasn’t. It wasn’t the brewery’s founding legend. It wasn’t tasting notes or the hop bill or anything a brand team could laminate. The story that traveled was about a person, and more precisely about a company trusting a person. Titletown’s best marketing at the biggest beer festival in the Midwest was a decision made in some production meeting months ago that had nothing to do with marketing: let him brew his.

That’s the piece I keep reveling in as I think about all I learned from another year of Great Taste. You cannot write that story. There is no agency you can hire to produce “our guy finally got his shot.” You can only make it true, then let the person it happened to carry it out into the world. Which means the loop most companies try to buy at the connection end, with referral programs and ambassador kits and incentivized reviews, Titletown got at the team end, for the price of one tank of beer and three years of trust.

Invest in your people and they walk around holding stories only they can tell. Those stories reach your customers in a voice no campaign has ever had. And your customers, if the story is true enough, will grab somebody by the sleeve to share it with.

The beer was very good, for the record. But the beer was the second best thing in that tent.

Stay Positive & I Hope You Get To Pour Yours