Marketing: Honeys, Hand Me a Polygamy Porter
Can chutzpah build a brand? Greg Schirf is betting the head off his lager that it can.
Published August 2002
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Starting a brewery in teetotaling Utah sounds about as smart as trying to sell pig's feet to a kosher deli. "If I had any brains, I would have stayed in Milwaukee, where people drink as a way of life and my friends could make me rich," says Greg Schirf, founder of Schirf Brewing Co., maker of Wasatch beers, in Park City, Utah. Instead Schirf declared Utah a brewer's holy land and proceeded to found not just a company but an entire industry. Before Wasatch opened its doors in 1986, there hadn't been a brewery in Utah for more than 20 years. With good reason, one might suppose. But Wasatch's counterintuitive location and its owner's predilection for regularly infuriating just about everyone have paid off consistently.
Admirers might call Schirf's in-your-face advertising and marketing strategies -- which typically poke fun at the local culture -- irreverent and playful. But those are probably not the first words that come to mind at the Utah Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission and the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, which have both been mightily offended by the brewery owner's over-the-edge advertising campaigns. That's OK with Schirf, whose politically incorrect tactics -- in an era of ever increasing political correctness -- have helped grow his company into a profitable $5.8-million microbrewery and brewpub that have garnered international media attention, not to mention impressive local market share.
For years, irreverence and beer advertising have gone together like, well, pretzels and Bud. But Schirf wasn't being strategic when he first used marketing tactics that won him both fans and enemies. He was just being Schirf, a draft-card-burning wise guy with a deeply held belief that authority exists to be flouted.
Consider, for instance, Schirf's decision to launch his brewery in the most straitlaced state in the nation. In 1974 he followed his older brother, Skip, to Park City. The two worked as construction subcontractors there until Greg got fed up with the ups and downs of the Utah real estate market in the mid 1980s. At that point he figured it was as good a time as any to pursue his own entrepreneurial dream: to make microbrews in his beloved Utah. He didn't dismiss the challenge of selling beer in a state where about 70% of the residents are Mormon, for whom alcohol consumption is frowned upon. He welcomed it. "Starting a brewery was very radical," says Schirf, 49. "That was a real attraction to me."
When Wasatch Brewery opened, he gave away free beer to the community. (That turned out to be illegal. Oops!) He hired the country's only female brewmaster and plastered her fetching image on posters. And most significantly, he got an arcane Utah law changed so that he could open the state's first brewpub, paving the way for more to follow. In the wake of each of those stunts, the press lapped at his heels hungrily. But so did his competitors.
By the mid-to-late 1990s, burgeoning competition was threatening Wasatch. The beer was being distributed in paltry numbers in seven states, but Schirf was losing the marketing battle to the more robust microbreweries -- and macrobreweries -- that were muscling in on the craft-brew niche. He had built a bigger brewery, "but by the time I got it up and running, we had local competitors," he laments. "The demand I envisioned all of a sudden wasn't there."
Tough times called for radical tactics, and Schirf was just the guy to deploy them. He decided to retrench, to concentrate all his resources on Utah, and to capitalize on peculiarities of the local culture. He'd often lucked into local publicity by pushing the limits of good taste, but he'd never actually set out to provoke. What would happen if he went way out on a limb in a quest for media attention? Would he land himself in jail? Get nailed with a fine? Would it be Wasatch's death knell -- or its finest moment? Schirf decided to find out.
In July 1998, Schirf made his move for Olympic gold. With an eye toward the 2002 Olympic Winter Games slated for Salt Lake City, Schirf knew that tiny Wasatch had no hope of getting in on the sponsorship action. So he adorned his sales manager's Chevy Blazer with a sign advertising Wasatch as "The Unofficial Beer of the 2002 Winter Games." The U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC), the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC), and Anheuser-Busch, the official Olympic beer sponsor, were not amused. SLOC sent Schirf a cease-and-desist order. Schirf immediately called the local media. "I said that I was getting picked on by SLOC," he says. "We were the lead on local television for a week straight." Of course, that's exactly what the gleeful Schirf had in mind. He dutifully stopped using the words winter games but reignited the controversy by adding a new product called "Unofficial" Amber Ale with "2002" crossed out in the middle of the label. SLOC was not appeased and continued to threaten legal action.
