Gage Roads Brand Transition to Good Drinks Parent Brand:
Good Drinks is the new home of brands for Gage Roads Brewing Co. - check out the website here: gooddrinks.com.au. Following the acquisition of Matso’s Brewery in Broome, Western Australia, Gage Roads underwent a brand restructure and the original brand name ‘Gage Roads’ now sits under the Good Drinks parent brand. Good Drinks now looks after a family of other well known alcoholic beverage brands including: Matso’s, Atomic, Alby and Hello Sunshine cider.
See the Good Drinks brand architecture below:
Brands and products in the Good Drinks family are authentic and meaningful, but most of all they’re made with a focus on taste and craftsmanship. In many ways, working with digital and brand assets is no different. The time and effort you put in is directly related to the quality of the resulting output.
The Good Drinks team works with bottle shops, venues, events and stadiums Australia wide. The servicing of these requirements is managed by a team of product, brand, marketing and sales managers located throughout Australia.
Common Characteristics with a House of Brands:
Most consumer product brands use the House of Brands strategy. That is, the product itself is the primary brand, rather than the parent company. In the case of Good Drinks, the strategy is no different. Everyone knows and loves the consumer facing ‘Gage Roads’ and ‘Matso’s’ brands, but less people will be familiar with the parent company ‘Good Drinks’. In this way, a house of brands strategy typically has the following characteristics:
- Marketing and Brand Awareness Reach – companies have a greater ability to define and target unique audiences and create products that broaden a brand’s demographic reach;
- Room to Innovate and Experiment – companies can take more risks with new product offerings, knowing they have strong, tested brands to fall back on if necessary; and
- Brand and Legal Protection – in the case of issues such as negative press and legal exposure, the individual brand can take the heat while keeping the parent company’s reputation secure and relatively intact, compared with a new product risking the entire company’s reputation for each new product release.
- Many Moving Parts – creating and implementing multiple marketing strategies and operating procedures across many product lines and tailored to unique drinkers and audiences is difficult, requires a lot of resources and can be costly.
Working with HIVO allowed us to streamline a rapidly growing house of brands under one roof and allow collaboration and visibility from management and marketing through to the sales and field team. We swiftly onboarded and created customised task management for creating and approving artwork to suit our internal processes. The proximity of workflow to assets is crucial for fast and on-brand distribution
Daniel English
Marketing Activation Manager Good Drinks
Challenges Specific to Good Drinks House of Brands:
As a digital asset management and marketing operations platform that is on a mission to unite technology, teams and data across multiple businesses and brands to all work together in a collaborative and secure cloud environment, the HIVO team was eager to work with the Good Drinks family of brands. Specifically, early workshops uncovered the following pain points that the HIVO platform needed to address:
- The existing legacy environment for artwork requests was clunky and did not offer a task and workflow management system beyond the initial request;
- Good Drinks had no digital asset management tool in place to efficiently manage the growing number assets across all of its brands and product lines;
- The support of an increasing number of marketing channels, as well as trends such as increasing product variations and shorter product life cycles all result in a significant growth in the number of required versions and derivatives of digital assets;
- Sales and marketing reps, as well as customers (venues and events), required a self service platform that provides access to all brand assets as they were needed by users in just a few clicks and accessible anywhere across Australia; and
- Brand consistency, in light of the above challenges, is a genuine and increasingly problematic challenge. As more brands are added to the Good Drinks family over time, a scalable system was needed to match the rate of the business growth.
How the HIVO Platform is Addressing Good Drinks Brand Challenges:
Bonded by a love for a good drink with friends and a passion for branding and all things digital, the partnership with Australian brand portal software provider HIVO was a natural fit for the Good Drinks team.
HIVO provided the Good Drinks team with a systemised and scalable way to manage:
- Multiple brand style guides;
- Demand and request management for all brand asset requests and marketing initiatives coming from marketing, sales and product managers;
- Collections and folder hierarchies for each brand for rapid self service of downloads and external sharing via url to suppliers;
Get in touch with our team today to request a demonstration and see HIVO in action.