A sad day at Cains
It was sad day at Glorious last week when we heard that one of our favourite clients, Cains Beer Company, had called in the administrators. The company bought a larger brewer last year, becoming a proper landlord as well as brewer. It turned out to be a bad time to buy almost 100 pubs.
We produced the company’s annual report and were working with them to develop and build their lager brand, and although we did lose some money in the recent situation, we sympathise with our friends in Toxteth.
We’ve been close to the owners since they first took over the company back in 2002. In those days Cains was in a bit of a sorry state, constantly changing hands. The Dusanj brothers worked hard and it has to be said from a marketing perspective, their plan was almost faultless, focusing on the brands, the product labelling while building strong local support (its internal PR). Advertising never really came into it, deals were done and relationships were built.
It came 2nd in GQ magazine ‘100 best things in the world in world’ – great PR. More importantly it secured distribution in every Morrisons supermarket in the country – the first premium British lager to do so.
Lager is rarely seen as an ABC1 product, so a British lager with all those British lager lout connotations could feasibly have been a disastrous idea. To counteract this, they hooked up with the Tate nationally and also became a sponsor of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture. They worked on their arts credentials and had a good story to tell. Obviously someone will come along and buy the brands – somebody will benefit from their hard graft – it’s just a shame it wasn’t them.
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