How to spoil a perfectly good pint of beer
I’ve been drinking Butcombe Bitter for many years and love it. But recent events have led me to question the way the company itself is run. I tried to ignore my misgivings but a bad experience at one of their pubs a few weeks ago led me to do some research. What I found was very surprising. But not uncommon. It’s a good example of what’s happened to countless British businesses – and why so many customers now feel they are being screwed by everyone from their bank to their utility company.
It all started so well…
Butcombe Brewery was founded in 1978 by Simon Whitmore and for 21 years they concentrated on making one really good ale, Butcombe Bitter. In 2003 Simon retired and the brewery was bought by Beer Seller founders Guy Newell and Paul Horsley. Living near the brewery, I knew a few people who worked there – by all accounts the management team was well liked with a good family feel to the business and employees who were well looked after. In 2015 it was then acquired by the Liberation Group, based in the tax haven of Jersey. Guy Newell left and took a financial stake in Bristol Beer Factory.
Oh no, a rebrand!
Following the purchase by Liberation group Butcombe discovered marketing. Instead of just concentration on making one great beer and letting the quality speak for itself they hired a young marketing director, who in turn hired a young and trendy branding consultancy in Bristol. Together they decided it was time to create some brand stories that would appeal to a younger audience, as well as launching some slightly more hipster-friendly brews (Goram IPA and Rare Breed Pale Ale for starters). In other words they decided to ignore the loyal existing customers and do some marketing that would score brownie points amongst their mates.
Marketing-speak gone mad
The consultancy features this rebrand project on their website. They explain that “We shaped a new strategic brand narrative, defining and creating opportunities for category growth, forged a complete revolution of visual identity and design for the traditional ale portfolio and created an entire brand architecture for a specialist, limited edition craft beer range.” Words like “strategic”, “narrative”, “revolution” and “architecture” make it all sound terribly grand and significant – like they are up there with Napoleon, Dickens, Lenin and Sir Richard Rogers. Hubris, or what?! But they are not alone – most of the industry is afflicted with this type of verbal flatulence.
I’ll have a pint of T Rex please
What this marketing bollocks meant, as far as the consumer (me and all the other loyal blokes who’d been drinking it for years) were concerned, was a joke. Butcombe Bitter became Butcombe Original and the label on the hand pump, the bottles, the beer mats and the rubber drip mats sitting on the bar, started sporting a big illustration of a rampant T Rex. Why? No idea. No publican could explain it to me either. Then I stumbled over an article in Design Week from 2017 where the head of the branding consultancy explained his thinking. “The label on the brewery’s original flavour beer now features an illustration of a Tyrannosaurus Rex as a play on the brewery being seen as a “dinosaur” beer brand”.
This is dumb on a number of levels. It showed total disrespect for a product and brand whose consistent quality had stood the test of time over 39 years and had built up a loyal following amongst people who really knew their beer – they were taking the piss out of the brand’s great heritage. It was also a poor attempt at a joke that nobody was likely to get – apart from, possibly, the design company’s hipster chums.
Finally, it revealed the designer’s desire to show off at the expense of the client. When I was at Saatchi & Saatchi, around the time Butcombe first started brewing, I was given this simple piece of advice: “We have a fiduciary responsibility towards our client’s brand. People should look at the work and think ‘what a great product…NOT what a clever ad’”. Using a comic illustration of a dinosaur to poke fun at your client in a poor attempt at getting some laughs from your mates is frankly pathetic. Shame on Butcombe’s Marketing Manager for going along with this.
Goram IPA
When they launched Goram IPA the graphics were equally questionable. The labelling featured a crudely drawn portrait of a bearded troll. The story here is that Goram was a legendary giant that lived on the site of present-day Bristol. Really? How many Bristolians know that or care about it - especially the young ones the beer was aimed at?
Wrenching the brand away from its rural roots
I then realised, looking at the website, that the brewery brand story had also been changed to make it more urban and “street”. The strapline “Bristol Born & Bristol Bred” started to feature prominently in their marketing and on the neck of every bottle of every brew the words “BRISTOL BORN” were added.
Bristolm Born - not!
This is patently not true. Anyone who has been drinking this stuff for years knows the original brewery started off in some old barns on Simon’s family farm in Butcombe (there’s a clue in the name). Butcombe is a sleepy village in the Chew Valley, on the edge of the Mendip Hills, 12 miles from Bristol. The Wikipedia entry describes it in these terms. “The parish has a population of 218 and mainly consists of family-owned farmland. It no longer has any amenities apart from a telephone kiosk and a letter box.” It could not be less urban and “street”.
In 2005 the brewery moved to bigger premises in the slightly larger village of Wrington, equally far from Bristol (2019 estimated population 2,759). In 2018 the brewery also opened a bottling, kegging and distribution depot in Bridgwater (38 miles from Bristol). And of course the company is headquartered in the Channel Islands, nowhere near Bristol. So, the new positioning and strapline is wishful thinking – the brewery has never been in Bristol and its roots are definitely in Somerset and the Mendips (an inconvenient truth the marketing luvvies decided to overlook).
Feeling the heat from competitors?
While researching this article I talked to someone in the trade about Butcombe’s new-found Bristol heritage. They suggested a further reason for the relocation – that it was in response to the rise and rise of the Bristol Beer Factory, part owned by former Butcombe owner Guy Newell.
How much rivalry is there between the two? When Bristol Beer Factory launched a US Pale Ale called “Independence” was that a dig at a rival that had just lost its independence to a private equity backed brewer in the Channel Islands?
On the left, Butcombe. On the right, Bristol Beer Factory. Surprisingly similar
When Butcombe launched Bohemia Craft Lager, described on their website as “brewed for the beatniks, created against convention, made by mavericks”, they could be describing Bristol Beer Factory. And look at the Butcombe packaging for this brew – same black background, same typeface, same red and white. The Butcombe beer even features a street map of central Bristol that’s almost identical to that of all the Bristol Beer Factory’s products.
Bristol Beer Factory Fortitude
What were the Butcome team thinking?! Ripping off your competitor’s brand in this way shows a huge lack of integrity and imagination, not to mention a deep insecurity.
Butcombe logo that’s a crude imitation of Bristol Beer Factory.
The similarities don’t stop there. Bristol Beer Factory’s logo features a pint glass with the head on the beer in the shape of Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge – a simple and graphically striking visual pun that’s wholly appropriate for a Bristol based brewery with Bristol in the name. Butcombe feature a line drawing of the same bridge on most of their packaging and marketing materials – clumsily done and not appropriate for a brewery that is not based in the city.
More ill-judged marketing debacles
As part of this drive to reposition the brand as young, hip, quirky and edgy the brewery (from what I remember) set up a few Butcombe bars at various music festivals. Someone who was close to the company at the time recently told me that there was an ulterior motive - the marketing manager and agency got free back-stage passes to some very popular music events.
Going back to the beers, they also launched Butcombe Blonde, with a prancing pony graphic. Sporting a blonde mane and tail it looks like a unicorn without a horn or a weak rip-off of my little pony.
Butcombe also launched Stateside Session IPA with an embarrassingly badly drawn label featuring a space shuttle (?), The Golden Gate Bridge (?) and some eagles (?). With BRISTOL BORN on the neck. It’s an embarrassingly infantile mashup of visual cliches and mixed messages.
Amateur, or what?
Then there’s Butcombe Gold. The graphics on this seem to have been assembled from clipart, using prominent Bristol landmarks. There’s the Clifton Suspension Bridge (again!) but the others are pretty hard to identify, even for someone who knows Bristol well – there’s possibly the Wills Building, The SS Great Britain, Cabot Tower and the Steam Crane.
Landmarks from a city where the beer is not brewed - and never has been.
Funnily enough a similar silhouetted skyline, but done with a bit more style and wit, is also to be found on the Bristol Beer Factory packaging.
Graphics on Bristol Beer Factory packaging
How well did this “complete revolution of visual identity and design for the traditional ale portfolio” and “new brand architecture for a specialist, limited edition craft beer range” work? I’m not sure but after a couple of years the young marketing person moved on and I suspect the branding agency went the same way. The T Rex image has been removed from the Butcombe Original bottle, pump label, beer mats and bar mats. Draw your own conclusions.
Having said all that, there is nothing wrong with the beers that Butcombe brew – quite the opposite in fact. As I researched this article I talked with a few people who really know their beer and they’ve all been full of praise for the product quality. It’s just a shame the marketing doesn’t do a better job of reflecting this.
A pint and a half with a parking ticket please
Fast forward to June 10th 2023. My wife Sheila and I are good friends with a well-respected foodie journalist. Every few weeks we meet for a Friday evening pint. I suggested the Swan at Rowberrow – none of us had ever tried this pub but it looked good, plus it served Butcombe Original. It’s in an isolated countryside setting up on the Mendip Hills. There’s a big pub car park opposite, which was surprisingly empty for a Friday night. The entrance is between two stone walls and there was a group twenty somethings around a table right next to one of these. I therefore drove in with some caution, not wanting to scrape our car or hit a jolly young adult. I was not looking for signs about parking charges as I didn’t expect any.
The Swan Inn, Rowberrow. Viewed from entrance to car park.
The pub was surprisingly empty. Yet there was a queue at the bar. A middle aged man (a new manager, I think) was struggling to serve drinks and operate the till. There were about three other young lads wandering in and out behind the bar but all of them made it clear they had no intention of serving a customer. After about 20 minutes, with about six other customers behind me, I got served. Our friend bought the next round and I got the third (she was on halves, Sheila was designated driver). Service was a little quicker because most customers had left.
Three weeks later I got a letter with a demand for a £100 parking fee from a company called GroupNexus. Apparently I was meant to register my car with the bar staff otherwise I was in breach of their terms and conditions. Walkers who park there but don’t use the pub are apparently required to pay £3 for 3 hours but customers are free provided they register.
A pint with a nasty aftertaste
I therefore had to spend about half an hour filling out the online appeal form on the website of the car park management company. I hadn’t kept my till receipt (I don’t think the barman was capable of supplying one, even if I’d asked) so scanned the relevant lines from my card statement. When I pressed the submit button my appeal was rejected as their system could not accept the file type for the scan. Eventually I was able to submit a photograph of my screen. I got an acknowledgement email that said “we are currently receiving a high volume of correspondence” but they promised to get back to me “within 35 days”. 35 days?!
Going on Tripadvisor I saw why they were getting so much correspondence. About half of the reviews for The Swan at Rowberrow were from people like me who unwittingly didn’t register, or paid £3 when they didn’t need to then got a £100 fine for overstaying the 3 hours, or people who did register but still got a £100 ticket. In each case the Manager apologises and blames “the system” or the fact “we’re short staffed”.
I then rang the pub and spoke to a member of staff. She said the sign about parking was featured prominently. I pointed out that I’ve never had to pay for parking at a relatively remote country pub on a quiet Friday night, so I wasn’t looking for a sign at the car park entrance – and it wasn’t prominent. Our journalist friend also missed the sign. She regularly drives past the pub and has never seen a sign about paying for parking. So it can’t be that obvious. Why wasn’t there a sign at the entrance to the bar? Or a little note on each table? And maybe the bar staff could prompt people to register their car (especially it’s a remote pub virtually everyone drives to)? I was assured that the charge would be cancelled.
I also made a comment on the “Contact us” form of the Butcombe website. I posted it on Sunday and at 8.46 Monday morning I had an apology from “Team Butcombe” assuring me they’d contact the parking management company to get the charge cancelled. So, they handled that really well and proved that there are some good people there doing their very best.
What’s the real problem here?
My complaint was swiftly resolved. And the beer is still good. But something is obviously wrong. This parking issue, judging from Tripadvisor, has been upsetting customers for a long time. So why not sort it out? What’s stopping them from getting proper signage and from training the staff better? I get the impression that the people who run the business just don’t care – don’t care about doing the marketing properly, don’t care that the staff of this pub are constantly getting abuse/rotten reviews from irate customers (no wonder they are short staffed) and don’t care about the adverse effect it’s having on their brand.
Curious about what kind of people could be so careless I looked at the senior management team on the Liberation Group website. At the time of writing this four of the seven came from a corporate finance background. With the Chairman and the Finance Director this is what one might expect (nb, since I started researching this article the Chairman has left and been replaced with someone with lots of experience in the hospitality industry). The other two had rather odd titles – Investor Director. Digging a bit deeper I saw they were both employed by Caledonia Investments, the company that bought Liberation in 2015. Their role, therefore, is to ensure that Caledonia gets a good return on the money they’ve invested in the brewer. In other words the management team was heavily weighted towards individuals with a number crunching mentality whose primary focus is almost certainly be on profitability. Not the kind of chaps who will prioritise customer experience and employee satisfaction over stuff like acquisition, expansion, revenue growth and EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes).
The story behind Caledonia Investments
This made me a bit curious about Caledonia Investments. I discovered from Wikipedia that “The company which became Caledonia Investments was incorporated in 1928 as the Foreign Railways Investment Trust Ltd. It was acquired by the Cayzer family in 1951 to hold their diverse interests and was renamed Caledonia Investments Ltd.”
My curiosity piqued further I discovered The Cayzer Family Archive www.cayzer.com. Cayzer may sound slightly Russian but the family were originally farmers from St Mawgan, on the north coast of Cornwall, between Newquay and Wadebridge. In the 1700’s one member of the family emigrated all the way to Devon. His son, the Reverend John Cayzer, moved to London around 1810. He in turn had a son, Charles William Cayzer, who became a schoolmaster living in Poplar. A son was born to this teacher in 1848 and the family confusingly named him Charles William Cayzer the second.
Cashing in on the British Empire’s trade monopoly
This second Charles William Cayzer was an ambitious sort. At the age of fifteen he became a clerk on a commercial shipping route to Japan. In 1861 he took up employment as a shipping agent in Bombay and by 1868 was working for the British-India Steam Navigation Company as master of stores. He then founded his own shipping business, C.W. Cayzer & Company, in Liverpool in 1877. The Cayzer Family Archive explains that “From this point on, in various incarnations, and by acquisition and merger, the Cayzer family were to have a profound influence on the history of shipping. The companies and lines associated with the Cayzer name include: Clan Line, Scottish Shire Line, Greenock Dockyard, Houston Line, Union-Castle Line, King Line, Springbok Line and the British & Commonwealth Shipping Co.”
I found an article on Bloomberg which explains that “the enterprise grew into the biggest carrier of freight, mail and passengers between ports in the British Empire. In 1904, King Edward VII made Charles the first Baronet of Gartmore, the 10,000-acre estate that became the family seat in the Scottish highlands. After World War II, the family reorganized the business into a new entity, British & Commonwealth Shipping Co., that eventually was led by Charles’s grandson Nicholas Cayzer.”
Leaving a sinking ship in the nick of time
Nicholas could see choppy seas ahead. The family fortune was reliant on an industry that faced some serious challenges. The rise of commercial aviation and the advent of the container ship in the 1960s dramatically altered the economics seaborne freight. At the same time those running newly independent colonies were not keen to deal with a company that had made its fortune from ferry freight and mail for the empire.
British & Commonwealth gradually disposed of its fleet and diversified into industrial paint, real estate, timber and British United Airways. The Bloomberg article explains that “The Cayzers parked their wealth in a sleepy firm the family had scooped up in 1951: Caledonia Investments. As British & Commonwealth expanded under non-family managers and became too convoluted, Peter Buckley, Charles’s great-grandson, hived off Caledonia from the company in October 1987.”
The sale of British & Commonwealth netted the family £100 million in cash and the promise of an additional £327 million to follow. The Bloomberg article notes that “Four days later, stock markets around the world crashed on Black Monday. British & Commonwealth collapsed in 1989, but the Cayzers got their money because the debt was underwritten by banks. Traders in London dubbed the family the “canny Cayzers.”
In 2019 the Bloomberg Billionaires index shows that the Cayzer family had a 48.5% stake in Caledonia, making them worth at least $1.4 billion. According to the Caledonia website the family still owns a 48% share. Going back to the Bloomberg article I found this illuminating paragraph explaining the nature of the investment company: ‘“It’s really a family office that’s publicly traded,” said Per Wimmer, the CEO of Wimmer Financial, a boutique investment bank, and head of his own family office in London.’ The Caledonia Investments website prefer to describe themselves as “a self-managed investment trust listed on the London Stock Exchange. Our experienced team manages assets of circa £2.8bn across an international, multi-asset portfolio, with a focus on companies that have the potential to generate exceptional long-term shareholder value.”
Truth in every taste
I notice, looking at the label designs the branding agency created in 2017, that each one includes the line “truth in every taste”. That line has since disappeared but it does raise a question – what is that truth? Is this still a fiercely independent craft brewer producing a lovely traditional bitter in a sleepy little Somerset village? Or, as the marketing people would have us believe, is the company a “Bristol Born & Bristol Bred” enterprise of edgy mavericks and artisan beer fanatics? Or, is it a cash cow being milked by hard-nosed financiers “to generate exceptional long-term shareholder value” for wealthy investors such as the billionaire Cayzer family?
Being economical with the truth
You could just dismiss this as a personal rant. But I think it highlights a growing problem with modern capitalism. In recent years corporations have become increasingly active in promoting their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) credentials – there’s been a lot of noise from companies about values, mission and the way they put people, purpose and planet before profit.
Every day, however, we hear fresh news stories that prove the opposite. In February this year The Guardian noted that “Rises in interest rates are driving unemployment, low wages and poverty while the banks make record profits and hand out huge bonuses”. It goes on to report that “Today HSBC reported doubling its quarterly profits to £4.3bn for the end of 2022. The big five banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, NatWest and Standard Chartered – look set to post profits of £37.4bn as they reveal their earnings for 2022. These are the highest since the 2008 crash and are coming straight from households and small businesses in the form of higher mortgage payments, and increased rates on loans.”
The UK’s largest building society also raked in pre-tax profits hitting £2.2bn in the year to 4 April - up from the £1.6bn achieved over the previous 12 months. Their cash pile is getting embarrassingly large so they are making a big deal out of sharing £340 million with 1 in 5 of their customers. I’m not great at arithmetic but by my calculations this still leaves them with £324,000,000,000 in profit from the last two years alone.
The reason for such a surge in profits? They’re all raising rates for borrowers faster than their rates for savers (and only offering their headline rates to savers who agree to tie their money up for long periods). On July 4th the BBC reported that “With the average rate for a two-year mortgage now 6.47%, the average easy access savings rate is 2.45%, according to Moneyfacts. That is a gap of 4.02 percentage points.” No wonder there’s a cost of living crisis.
Doing a great job – of enriching themselves
Then there are all those organisations that do prioritise people – ie their CEOs, other top directors and shareholders. In June 2023, when consumers continue to struggle with soaring energy bills, the CEO of Centrica (British Gas) is awarded £4.5 million in annual pay (the company tripled its profits last year). In August 2022 The Guardian reported that “Average pay for FTSE 100 chiefs jumps by 39% to £3.4m. Study shows median CEO package has surpassed pre-pandemic levels with rate 109 times that of average UK worker.”
Dirty water
The water companies are also taking the piss (literally and figuratively). On June 29th The Guardian reported that “the accounts of the nine water and sewage companies show they have been investing less than £4.6bn between them a year on average over the last 20 years. It also found that all of this investment has been paid for with borrowed money and none appears to have been funded by their shareholders, who over that same period took all the profits the companies made out of them by way of dividends, leaving nothing for reinvestment.”
The CEO of Thames Water recently stepped down a few days after the company’s woeful environmental record (regular dumping of raw sewage and a five year high in water lost to leaking pipes) was revealed. She relinquished her 2022-3 performance linked bonus but kept her previous bonus of £496,000 and her package for the last financial year was still £1.5 million. The BBC also covered this story on the 29th of June: “The water firm, which serves a quarter of the UK population, has billions in debt and is under pressure with its boss resigning unexpectedly on Tuesday. If the firm cannot secure additional funding, it could be temporarily taken over by the government until a new buyer is found, in a special administration regime (SAR). This route was most recently taken with energy supplier Bulb after it ran into financial difficulties.” This scenario, where directors drain companies of cash to line their own pockets and reward shareholders, then get the government (ie taxpayers) to bail them out to the tune of billions, is being repeated with alarming regularity.
What’s the answer?
What can we do about all this? Boycott companies that are screwing us – like so many banks and building societies, water companies and energy suppliers? Along with all those whose marketing is mendaciously misleading? The only option left to me is to head down to my local pub to drown my sorrows. But not with Butcombe, obviously. I have two other options if I want to continue drinking there. London Pride, a genuine British pint with a great heritage. Or Peroni, a true Italian lager. Only I can’t. Both brands are now owned by Asahi, the Tokyo based brewery group. Maybe I’ll have to stick to drinking water. Oh, I forgot, I can’t do that either.
