Steam Whistle continues to succeed because of their holistic approach to relationship management.
by Michael Chu
Successful organizations are only as good as their employees, and while it seems natural that as a company continues to expand, the more structured and hierarchal it usually tends to become, this has not been the case at all with Steam Whistle.
James Foran credits part of his success at Steam Whistle to the positive work environment (Courtesy: Steam Whistle)
The focus seems more reliant on establishing trusting relationships between the company, its employees and ultimately their customers. This approach appealed to James Foran, a current marketing-coordinator.
Foran started off at Steam Whistle in 2008 in the retail and events department, quickly getting involved with marketing, while being one of the home delivery drivers. Foran immediately found his niche in the marketing team, and is now a marketing co-coordinator entrusted with the home delivery program at Steam Whistle.
How has Steam Whistle been able to succeed by essentially offering just one product, when many other beer companies have tried to succeed by diversifying or increasing their product lines?
Because we only make one beer, it allows us to focus all of our efforts on this one product as premium a pilsner as possible. As far as marketing the product, we are not advertising multiple brands, so inventory control is easy. Everybody here, from the retail store to the production is focused only on one product.
Some of the other breweries that were doing this have moved on and are making multiple beers now. Part of the vision when the company started was to make one premium product and to never shift off this focus. It has allowed us to put everything behind [the vision] as much as possible.
It seems that Steam Whistle has embraced a grass roots marketing strategy.
The founders wanted to go with a 1950’s themed brand. Back then emphasis was on overbuilt quality. What we want to do is start with our bottle, based on the era’s pop bottle, our vintage fleet, our packaging, to show overbuilt quality with a retro feel. We want to pay tribute to an era when things were made better than they had to be.
As far as our marketing strategy out in the field, instead of just doing billboards where you have no control over who sees them, we want to get all of our employees out there and go out and talk to people. Every time they do get the opportunity to go and talk to someone, they can answer questions, let people know about the brand and to let them know what we are doing that is different. We have stayed away from doing TV and anything like that. We have such a great pneumonic, the whistle, so we do use some radio hits.
We sponsor a lot of indie music events so we try to make sure our brand is consistent. We try to stay away from the industry standards. We want to do stuff that is unique that we can get behind.
We have a mandate as well to support charities and local community events. We do everything we can to shape our brand using this strategy.
What are some of the strategies to have solid organizational structure? I noticed just how diverse the employees are, and more importantly, how happy everybody was to be working at Steam Whistle.
For certain positions, for example the chief financial officer, we’ve gone out and recruited people who have that expertise. Unavoidably you need to have certain positions filled with these types of people.
As a small, growing company, there is opportunity for upward growth. It’s a great opportunity for those that really stand out to move into some major roles. Our director of marketing started off in the bottling line and has been here for eight or nine years now. It’s great that we don’t source people from outside the company unless we necessarily have to.
(Courtesy: Steam Whistle)
The main thing is that people like being here. You really have to have a passion for it. You mentioned people smiling. Coming in every day, I walk into the retail store, working in a brewery with a lot of people that are great, it is very much like a family.
Talking more about the business strategy, how has the launch into Western Canada gone?
It’s been great. We started in Alberta about four years ago. We’ve gone from having no exposure out there to having about 10 per cent of our sales coming from Alberta. Our goal is to be Canada’s premium pilsner. We want to be across the country as soon as we can. Having said that though, we want substainable growth. We don’t want to rush and just get our beer out there.
As much as we’d like to be everywhere right now, we are doing it, making sure that everything is working. The same grass roots marketing we are executing here we are doing out there and everything is coming together.
What are Steam Whistle’s goals for the rest of 2010?
We recently opened up in Vancouver so we are going to develop that market further. Edmonton is a new market we’ve pursued in the last two to three months. So we are going to do everything we can to make sure Edmonton is up to speed as well.
We are still focusing heavily on a few of the events and charities going on.
Our next big promotional event coming up, is our in-case openers (Each 12 pack comes with a Steam Whistle branded opener), which are retro themed, coming out by the middle to end of May.
(This is part two of a four part spotlight on Steam Whistle Brewery)
Click here to view Brewing A Passion For Steam Whistle
