Sunday 19 January 2014

Greene King's crafty rebrand

Greene King is in the process of rebranding several of its beers with new, more consistent labels in a hand-drawn style clearly meant to look handcrafted. Here's a pop-up exhibition banner showing several of them.

The existing beers getting new labels are St Edmunds, Strong Suffolk (which also now gets the suffix "Dark Ale" instead of "Vintage Ale") and Yardbird. You can (for now) see the original labels and pumpclips here.

Also getting a new label are Twisted Thistle IPA (an ex-Belhaven brand) and Noble - yes, in case you hadn't realised, "Noble Craft Lager" is a GK brew. Even the manager in one of my local GK pubs was surprised when I pointed this out to him!

And there's some new beers coming to this family, including Double Hop Monster IPA, Suffolk Porter and St Edmunds Anniversary Ale.

What do you think - does GK stand a chance, branding these as craft?

3 comments:

  1. So, they are trying to create brand recognition, eh? It might well work to a degree but probably only because they are changing the labels 'tricking' buyers into thinking that they are new beers. ;-) seriously though, it probably shows greater brand confidence and may even be the precursor to other company changes.

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  2. They have got a new smaller brewery too so I'll be interested to see what they come up with.

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  3. I'm not sure about branding these beers as craft, but the Suffolk Porter and St Edmunds Anniversary Ale sound interesting.

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