B (7:47)

Still working, eh? Take tomorrow off.

A (7:59)

You know those times when you're not drinking but you really fancy a lovely cold, smooth Guinness. Well, guess what, Guinness zero. We've taken the alcohol out. We left the Guinness in. We're back with Matt Herbert. He is co founder of Tracksuit, the affordable brand tracking solution. And we're here to talk about Athletic Brewing. I see this everywhere I go, man. It feels like an incredible success. What does the data say its segment which is the alcohol free beer category?

C (8:42)

Oh, Traxo, we love a good challenger brand and Athletic Brewing is an up and comer that demonstrates exactly why we got into the business in the first place. Athletic. Right now the alcohol free beer category in the U.S. it's still an emerging category. It sits at 30 at 29% penetration. So it's around about 74 million people in the U.S. now you can compare that against the total beer category, 54% category penetration. But if you look at this, almost a third of people in the US have claimed to have used or purchased an alcohol free beer in the last.

A (9:22)

Three months as a category. It's had in the past a very bad reputation in terms of taste. Are you guys seeing in your data that those people are becoming repeat drinkers? Yeah.

C (9:34)

This is not to say that if you're an alcohol, if you buy or drink alcohol free beer that you don't also drink beer or if you're a beer drinker, you don't also change over to alcohol free beer every now and then. And so that's why we're tracking both and we can see those fluctuations throughout the year. You touched on the point and one of the biggest drivers of consideration and preference is taste. Do I perceive this brand as having great taste? It's been a struggle in this category until the likes of Athletic Brewing comes along. As someone myself, I'm active in.

A (10:12)

Both.

C (10:12)

Categories, particularly the alcohol free of more recent times. What I love about Athletic is they only do non alcoholic and they have a full range of different beers from stouts to IPAs to hazies. And you can have the proper experience and the taste is because that is what they do front and center and great taste, that's what shifts perceptions.

A (10:35)

So who's drinking alcohol free beer?

C (10:37)

There's a 7 percentage point drop between 25 to 34 year olds and so they're, you know, over the last six months they've been losing that 25 to 34 year olds in this alcohol free. Maybe it's summer, maybe people going back to the beer, you know, maybe, you know, these are all these different seasonalities and things we can look at. But there has been an increase in category penetration between 35 to 44 year olds over the past six months. And so does that indicate more people are kind of choosing conventional beer? Whereas some demographics, maybe they're more health conscious, they're sick of ordering Ubers or being hungover with young kids running around. There is movements, but ultimately it's that kind of. That 25 to 34 year old is where the category skews.

A (11:24)

Thanks, Matt. This is my conversation with Andrew Katz, CMO of Athletic Brewing. Enjoy. So it's great to have Andrew Katz with us today. Athletic Brewing and their products. Athletic Beer we'll talk about today. And you've probably seen it everywhere. It seems that every store I go into, Andrew, has got a display of Athletic Brewing products. And I see you guys play that up a lot in your advertising too. So brilliant to have you here and great to talk about this sort of ubiquitous brand in the alcohol free beer segment.

B (11:57)

Thanks, thanks for having me. And that's all perception is reality. Because the truth of the matter is our distribution lags behind some of the bigger competitors in the segment. But perception is everything. So if you think it's everywhere, then in fact it's everywhere.

A (12:16)

So tell us about the early days of the business and the brand name. Have you been there since the beginning or how long have you been in place?

B (12:25)

So I joined in late 2021 and the company really started selling beer officially in 2018. So this was coming up on my four year anniversary in October and I joined Bill and John, who are two co founders, along with a very talented team of marketers and ops and sales and brew crew. So the foundation was really solid by the time I got here.

A (12:54)

What was your remit? Why did they hire you?

B (12:58)

Don't screw it up. No. So the remit, the remit was really how do we take what we're doing and start to really scale it? So that there was, I think in most startups this is pretty typical. And I was running my own startup prior to joining Bill and John and, and the Athletic Brewing team. I think what happens is in the early days of any startup organization there's just a ton of people who are willing to do anything that needs doing. And you have all these great generalists, you have all these energy and you know, it's like, oh, we need to go get this beer from Here, over to there, somebody raises their hand, I'll do that.

A (13:45)

Everybody jumps in the car.

B (13:46)

Yeah, everyone jumps in the car. Or someone says, hey, we need some new social media content. Someone's like, I'll do that. And so you go from a team of very talented generalists to, you know, as, as the operation matures to just people that are more specialists.

A (14:07)

Right.

B (14:07)

And, and they, and they just have a different skill set. And they still, you still are expected to roll up your sleeves and have that entrepreneurial approach to things. However, you probably have domain expertise that didn't exist before you got here.

A (14:24)

So when you look at the early days of this now, I listened yesterday to most of that wonderful interview with Bill Shufelt when he did the Guy Raz show how I built this. Yeah, what a terrific backstory for this brand, huh?

B (14:43)

Yeah, super cool. Super cool. And when I say that we were working on getting him onto how I built this from the day that I got here, that was definitely one of my, you know, crowning moments. Highest achievements since joining the team was like having that happen. And again, it wasn't because of me. There was a very talented, you know, number of teammates who, who made that come to fruition. But that didn't happen overnight. We were knocking on Guy Raz's door for a long time.

A (15:14)

How big is the category today? It's about 225.

B (15:19)

Yep. So I mean, the amazing thing is that it's grown substantially since the the over the last three year. The compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, is 25% for the category. So we're looking at a category that closed 2024 at almost $700 million. And that's retail only. That doesn't take into account on premise or other channels.

A (15:49)

So when you look at the, at the, at the use occasions for a beer like this, what is the typical use occasions and what are those sort of category entry points right now?

B (15:59)

So we talk about three primary use cases. We talk about a chaser, a spacer or a replacer, a placer or a chaser, a spacer or a replacer. So a chaser is exactly what it sounds like. And there are a couple really fun drink specials that I've come across like the Hypocrite, which is a shot of tequila and upside down, which I have right here.

A (16:24)

That's great.

B (16:25)

So the Hypocrite or the boiler faker is another one. So it's sort of mixing what I would call traditional drinking with some non alcoholic new traditions. So that's sort of the Chaser the spacer is I'm having, I'm toggling back and forth between regular alcoholic beer and some non alcoholic beer. And then replacer is just. It's a Tuesday night, there's a baseball game on or there's, you know, WNBA is on. And I don't really feel like drinking alcohol tonight, but I do want a beer. I want the all of, all of, like, the good stuff about beer. I want the smell, I want the mouth feel. I want, you know, the rituals. But I don't necessarily need alcohol tonight because there's no, there's no real, no, no real reason for it tonight.

A (17:21)

I love to cook. Every evening I try to cook and when I'm cooking, I love to drink wine. Right?

B (17:27)

Yeah.

A (17:28)

And I look back and I'm like thinking, hey, I'm drinking wine seven days a week and I'm not feeling as good in the morning as I used to when I was younger. So I've started to drink products like yours as a substitute for wine. And I feel better in the morning. I was drinking a couple of glasses of wine in the night, but I feel better in the morning. And I feel pretty proud about the fact that I'm, you know, that I'm not drinking as much. And it's. Right, it was a habit. It's not, not an addiction, but it's a habit. It's something I did ritually when I cooked and when I ate dinner. And so it's good to be able to rotate something else into that mix. Right?

B (18:09)

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's spot on. I do think it's also traditionally been like a marker for a lot of people. Like my day ends and this is the marker that my workday is ending and my personal time is beginning. So a lot of people use that. And now you can still do that same thing like you do with cooking, but you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily drinking alcohol seven days a week, but maybe three or four days a week you are.

A (18:36)

So how do you position against the big, larger brewer brands like Heineken, Corona Guinness with their 0.0 offerings? How do you position against those brands and how do you think about them in terms of how you go to market?

B (18:54)

For the most part, I'm going to pull a Red Bull quote, which is my competition isn't any of those. My competition is indifference. My competition is people who are unaware of my brand. So I think that we all coexist. I think that we view all of the above is really helpful to the growth of the category, the normalization of the behavior. So I, I think it's a wonderful thing that a lot of these big brands are spending money in the category, educating consumers about alternatives. But for the most part, we think mostly about, you know, only our, our proposition and how do we get that to more people?

A (19:38)

But doesn't it free you up to do more than Heineken can do? To define the category, to define a brand in a fresher way in culture like Guinness and others are more limited. You've got the opportunity to really frame something distinctive.

B (19:56)

I agree, I agree. And you're right, they have a reference brand with alcohol. We do not. They can't sell against themselves. So they have to establish a reason for their 0 product to exist or their NA product to exist. Most of the time it's done around sort of, I would call like very old school thinking, like responsible drinking or designated driver drinking, but that's. Those use cases are really small and they miss that bigger, broader picture. So in many ways we have. You're right, Fergus. We have these degrees of freedom that the incumbents don't have and we can write our own playbook and our own rules because we don't have to worry about legacy brands and we don't have to worry about legacy alcohol.

A (20:43)

How do you define your target audience? Like, I mean, somebody asks you that to, like, what, what are they and what are their motivations? How do you sort of say that in a simple way?

B (20:54)

So we call them active improvers. And these active improvers have a certain mindset, which is I'm trying to pursue a little bit better for myself, for my family, for my community, in whatever way that shows up for them. And it could be all the way from I'm a triathlete, which is sort of the pinnacle, to I'm a new parent who's not getting enough sleep. But I still want to celebrate and hang out with friends, and this enables me to do all of that. So performance, there is a performative piece to our drinkers, which is performance at some level really matters to them. Whether I want to perform as a parent, a spouse at work, or on the field somewhere.

A (21:42)

Has anybody ever, maybe you guys have done this. Has anybody ever studied the sort of the impact that drinking beer has on you? And how is it different without the alcohol? Because I'm wondering how much of it is psychosomatic. It's like, I think I'm drinking a beer. Am I getting all of the physical and emotional reactions from a non alcoholic beer that I will get from an alcoholic beer. And how, how wide is the difference between both?

B (22:18)

Yeah, it depends how many beers you had already.

A (22:22)

Yeah, right.

B (22:23)

No, I'm serious. I mean, if this is all you're drinking, the rituals are the same. The crack of the can, the aroma, the mouth feel, the hoppiness, all of that is identical. So if you're only drinking Athletic in a night, you're gonna. That, that'll be. The ritual will feel very, very familiar, minus any of the side effects. If you've been drinking and you've already had two IPAs, and let's say there's 6.6.0, I, you know, ABV or higher, this third one, you. There's diminishing return in terms of how much alcohol you actually can taste anymore.

A (23:03)

Because you kill all what you're conscious of. Yeah, right. Right.

B (23:06)

So, so for the most part, if and, and I've. This is again like anecdotal research that I've done with bartenders. They're like, we love having Athletic on draft. Because if I feel that someone's had too many, I'll just pour them an athletic, give it to them, and they're so happy.

A (23:27)

Interesting.

B (23:28)

Honestly don't know the difference, but.

A (23:31)

So how, how important is your, is your packaging? Because it doesn't look like a beer. And I've got to assume that that packaging is deliberately so. Right. Because you don't seem to sort of fall into the tropes of beer packaging.

B (23:47)

I think our packaging. So for me, and this is a lesson I learned early in my career when I was working at Pepsi, that is your best advertising, full stop. You have the best distribute, the best distributed advertising. The most visible part of your brand is your packag. So the more you can think about how you show up on shelf, how visible you are from 10ft away, a lot of the things that are just paramount to great branding, great marketing, a lot of those things existed in our packaging before I got here in our brand colors. And many of those things were already in place. And part of the first thing that I got to do when I was here is just some cleaning up of our packaging. So it really stood out on shelf that really from 10ft away, it was unmistakable in the blink of an eye.

A (24:40)

What would be an example of the part of that cleanup? What were you doing graphically?

B (24:44)

So we used to treat Athletic Brewing Company as equal components of the brand. But the truth of the matter is Brewing Company is generic and we can't own that because there are lots of brewing companies. The thing that we Truly own is athletic. So leaning into that more, making that the bar call the retail shout. Where's your athletic? Give me an athletic. So we're just training the consumer to ask for athletic, which is part of our ad campaign. Do you have that really great non alcoholic beer? Athletic?

C (25:14)

You're looking at it.

B (25:15)

It's athletic, ask for it.

A (25:17)

What do you think? Are those hurdles to growth for you guys? Are there, are there sort of these entrenched perceptions of AF beer that holds you back? Is it sort of a category challenge or is it a product based challenge or is it a brand based challenge in your view?

B (25:35)

I think it's really more opportunity versus challenge. There are. We know how big our TAM is in the US for example, it's tens of millions of, of drinkers and most 80% of our drinkers drink alcohol. So the easy and obvious answer is where does this fit into my repertoire as a drinker? Part of its education. Like I've never really thought much about anything before. Now I'm hearing a lot more about it. I'm just not sure where it fits in for me. And so part of our job is to educate consumers about here's where it fits in. And then the other part is, to your point, taste is both a benefit and a barrier. So when we do a tremendous amount of sampling still. So cans and hands is one of our most important things that we do as a marketing team and a broader team, which is we go and sample our beer at all these events. Getting cans in hands, getting people to try it who are like, yeah, I only drink beer for the alcohol, just try it. And it's remarkable that when you have a one on one conversation with someone, get them to try the product, you see them start to wrap their head around. I, I'm now starting to get it, but it takes a lot of repetition. It's not, it's not just, you know, you do that once and it's work and they're a customer forever.

A (26:56)

So do you think, do you think of yourselves as, as a part of your, is part of your sort of goal to build the category or do you see, should I'd rather have Heineken do that or somebody else do that and then you guys want to focus on brand and preference?

B (27:11)

Yeah, I think, you know, in sort of a world of, of constrained resources, a lot of the brands you mentioned have bigger, have bigger marketing budgets, more resources than we do. So yes, I think there is something to having those, those other brands build the category and then we benefit. Like we were talking before we're. Because we're a pure play, because this is all we do. There's an opportunity for us to win that drinker as well. Now that they're in the category, now that they've figured out, oh, this is where na fits in to my repertoire of drinking. I want to try that one. I want to try that one. And they're curious to try these other brands.

A (27:53)

What do you think, as a sidebar, what do you think of Liquid Deaths advertising? Because Liquid Death sort of started off in that similar sort of concert and festival circuit, being a replacement for being one of those, what you call a spacer, et cetera. What do you think of their work and contrast that and their audience against yours?

B (28:17)

I mean, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Liquid Death and Mike Cesario and his team and what they've built is nothing short of amazing, because, again, going back to my Pepsi days, we used to market at Aquafina when I was there. And the reality is, water is water is water is water. There's really no difference. And it's very difficult in a commodity category to stand out. And they've really figured out brilliantly a way to elevate their brand, their proposition, so that it is in that category. And they've obviously diversified a lot.

A (28:54)

Yeah. And their packaging, of course, does that. That tall boy can. Is just a great flip of a category convention, right?

B (29:01)

Yeah. I mean, I think they've taken so many things, so many conventions, and just flipped them on their head and gone up against the biggest competitors there are to go up against. So I. I mean, I have a lot of respect for what they do, how they do it, but it's very different from our consumer, very different from our drinker, very different from our proposition. Water is not, not generally something you cheers with. Water is not something you have, you know, really savory meal with. I think there's a complexity to beer that we deliver on that water will never be a substitute for.

A (29:38)

So let's talk about your campaign. Your brand platform, as I understand it, is fit for all times. Is that something that you developed under your purview? Was it in. Was it in place? And then what do you want it to mean?

B (29:52)

Well, when I got here, we had a couple of different things we were saying at the same time. One was, brew without compromise, beer without compromise, fit for all times. And consumers can only hold so many thoughts about one brand in their brain. So part of it was in the art of strategy is what you don't do. So part of it was finding the through line that was something bigger. Not that any of those things are wrong. We still do use those marks from time to time. But ultimately it's about what's in it for the consumer. Right. Because brew without compromise is. That's about us. Right. That's how we do what we do. Fit for all times gets at a bunch of different things simultaneously. One, obviously there's a double entrance, which is when I drink this, it's an athletic is in our name. So this is a beer that helps me stay on my fitness journey better than some other things. Right. Because staying fit, staying well, staying healthy is important. So it checks that box. But then fit for all time, it takes out some of the friction from. Ah, man, I'd love a beer right now, but I've got a, you know, after lunch I've got a meeting that I need to stay awake for.

A (31:13)

Yeah.

B (31:13)

Or, you know, I really want to have a beer before going to bed, but I don't really want the alcohol. So it's, it's, it's literally beer that you can drink anytime. And it's a. Obviously a much more clever way of saying it than that, but that's a.

A (31:28)

Pretty goddamn good way to say it. Beer that you can drink at any time is actually a really interesting line. Yeah.

B (31:34)

But again, it plays on that double entendre of. Yes. It helps me maintain my well being and it's also something I can drink whenever I want.

A (31:44)

Yeah. And it's not at all preachy. Right. So it has that sense. I do love a couple of the spots. The spot that I've seen is the David Chang and J.J. watt spot.

B (31:55)

Yeah.

A (31:57)

Tell us about the structure of that messaging. Because the subtlety in terms of a fit for all times, in terms of the activities that these guys are doing during the spot, it's like, yeah, that's exactly when I don't want to be buzzed.

B (32:11)

Yeah. Well, like you were saying. So we showed J.J. watt drinking what we would call the ultimate lawnmower beer. Mowing the lawn. Right. And you know, if you want to have kind of a straight lines, you know, when you're cutting your own lawn and like you want to be sober, but you also want to have something delicious and celebratory to drink. And then just hanging out by the pool, it's just a great option to have. And then Dave Jang is making dinner for the family and he's enjoying an athletic, but he wants to be present and spend time with his family.

A (32:53)

But he's also there, not only that he's also chopping aggressively. He's like chopping an onion. So this guy can't afford to clip himself with the Blair. So it's that little. The little symbols and the little triggers in the creative, I think is really strong.

B (33:08)

Yeah, it would be. It would be an occupational hazard if he did that.

A (33:11)

Most definitely. Beautiful day, huh?

B (33:28)

Dinner time. Time for another.

A (33:34)

Oh, yeah, you used to work on Dos Equis.

B (33:45)

Yes.

A (33:46)

I love that campaign. The Most Interesting man in the World. Did you kill it? Can we blame you or what happened? Cause I think you came in at the point where the first guy came off and the next guy came in.

B (33:58)

Yes.

A (33:58)

Can I throw darts at you or explain your. Your way out of this one?

B (34:03)

Well, look, I think the Most Interesting man in the World campaign is one of those most celebrated seminal campaigns in the history of advertising. I think absolutely brilliant. Certainly in beer. And when I was hired at Heineken, the, the, you know, we. We turned over literally every stone about where to go next. Right. Because we wanted to evolve the campaign. Things had changed a lot since it had launched a decade earlier. And our thought process that we validated and tested was along the lines of James Bond is a. It's a franchise, it's a character, but it's gone on for a very long time. And it's been populated by a lot of different actors along the way. And the thought process, can we emulate that? So that was our ingoing hypothesis. I think in the end, it didn't work out like I had hoped. Like I think the company had hoped.

A (35:05)

Yeah. Why. Why did the first guy drop out of the campaign? Was that your choice to. Because you wanted to refresh it, or was it his choice just get out?

B (35:14)

More than anything, I think it was just. It was this desire. It was just having less efficacy. Like the campaign itself was just not attracting as many new drinkers to the brand as it had in the past. And we had the franchise of those drinkers that had grown up, loved the campaign, loved him, but we weren't attracting enough new. So if I had to do it all over again, what I would have done differently was set aside the creative for the moment and really interrogated, do we still have the right insight? Is this insight, this consumer insight around how the campaign became to be in the first place still even relevant?

A (35:55)

What was that? What was that insight? Do you remember?

B (35:57)

The. The insight was ostensibly that, you know, men in their twenties aren't very interesting and they are not self confident sitting at a bar. You know, they wish they had some more wisdom. They wish they had some more experience. And so the most interesting man in the world was their aspiration of who they would want to become eventually. But they gave them the idea was give these guys the confidence that when they're holding a Dos Equis, it says.

A (36:27)

It'S like a meme in and of itself.

B (36:29)

Yeah, like I'm a man of the world, like I'm a worldly guy, even if I'm not, of course. And I think the social media hadn't really been invented. When the campaign kicked off, it was in full swing. So now all of a sudden everybody was interesting. Everybody was doing interesting things and so interesting that we used to have a monopoly on as a brand was now democratized and everybody was interesting. And if you don't believe me, just look at my feed.

A (36:57)

How do you go about tracking the progress of athletic brewing? Is there a system you have? How do you do it and what, or you know, what are the most important KPIs for you at this growth stage?

B (37:11)

Yeah, I think it's, it's a great question. I think it's not dissimilar from how I would look at a legacy brand. I think the one difference is, you know, legacy brands are more ubiquitous and more well known. Our key KPI is our awareness and consideration. How many people are spontaneously aware of us and then if they're not, or if they are, how many people are have aided awareness of us? So in the last six months, have you heard of these brands? Would you consider these brands if you were shopping for a non alcoholic beer? And then we also look at some more hard, you know, hard metrics around rate of sale, around sales, around household penetration. So we look at a lot of the things that you would expect most CPG brands to look at.

A (38:06)

So where does fit for all times go? Next is the work that I've seen with J.J. watt and with Chang. How old is that?

B (38:15)

That's going back a couple years. We've evolved from that message to a little bit more. So what we call living athletics. So it's more about the lifestyle and where athletic fits in. Right. So just kind of like more of our brand manifesto. Here's why we exist, you know, here's where we fit into your life. And then we have what I would call a much more brick to forehead campaign called Ask for Athletic.

A (38:44)

Yeah, is that new? Is that, is that 20, 24, 25?

B (38:48)

Yeah, we launched that in I think 24 and continue the campaign. And part of it is like you were saying at the top. Just this perceived ubiquity. Like, oh, my God, these guys are everywhere. Yeah, right. Even though we're not. And then the other piece of it is just preference and taking away some of the, you know, if people are not really wanting to ask, hey, do you have any na beer? You know, or where's your na beer? Just, hey, where's your athletic? Or can I have an athletic? Do you have Athletic? And so just training the consumer to just ask for athletic. You don't even need to ask for the category.

A (39:25)

Yeah, yeah. It works on multiple levels because, number one, it sort of makes you more comfortable even asking for it. It gives. It gives a retailer a sense that people are going to be asking for it and gives it hopefully, better shelf positioning as a result of that. Great connecting with you. It is Andrew Katz's CMO at Athletic brewers and do go out and check out that product. I actually have some in my refrigerator, so I haven't cracked them yet.

B (39:50)

I'm going to crack one because these are fit for all time. Right.

A (39:54)

I love that. I love that job.

B (39:56)

And nobody's going to look at me sideways.

A (39:58)

That's right. Great talking with you, Andrew. Thanks for your time today. I appreciate it.

B (40:02)

Really nice having the opportunity to talk to you and be on the show.

A (40:06)

All right, man. I will talk to you soon and we will see everybody on the next episode.