Somebody had to be the pioneer.
In recent years, craft brewers have been breaking new ground, reinventing old ideas, challenging conventions, and packaging all this amber glory up in the most innovative, creative packaging seen in a very long time. So, to any fan of craft beer, it would come as no surprise that this sense of packaging, marketing, and branding innovation seems to simply run in the blood.
Back in the 1800s, Bass Brewing in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, England, had become the largest brewery in the world, selling a million barrels of the good stuff across the known world every year. Founded in 1777 by William Bass, the business was then responsible for one of the highest-selling beers in the UK, Bass Pale Ale.
The popularity of the beer was clear evidence that the Bass family were skilled at brewing (and doing international business before the internet), but it turns out they were smart marketers too. Aside from the amber liquid itself, was there anything else that differentiated their beer from others out there? It was a red triangle on the barrels. The red triangle was a simple symbol to mark the promise of quality and provenance of the product, with each one of those million barrels being a mark of brand promise across the British Empire.
While the idea of marking one’s product in some way dates back to ancient times (as early as the idea of products and transactions in pottery vessels) in 1876, the Bass Brewery truly became branding pioneers for another reason. Recognising the value of their symbol as a store of value for the product and company, they became the first business in the UK to trademark their logo – the first to legally protect the IP of their marketing materials. In the first journal of UK trade marks, published on 3 May 1876, Bass Brewing’s red triangle was officially registered as trade mark number UK00000000001.
Interestingly, the red triangle Bass logo was also one of the earliest examples of product placement, featuring very prominently in the famous painting by Manet, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882). Picasso also painted Bass in a number of works, showing how the value of a strong, protected brand can transcend the product itself, even becoming an object of art.
The Bass triangle trademark is still in place, and there have been a number of revivals of Bass Pale Ale over the years, including a global relaunch of the drop by global brewing giant AB InBev in 2018, featuring nearly identical artwork from almost 200 years before.
What does this show us? It shows just how valuable and timeless the visual marks of a brand are, and the longevity they can ensure for a product – outliving even the product itself. None of us would be privy to tasting the exact beer product made back in the 1800s, so who knows how faithful the drink is to the original? Our guess would be that there would most likely have been some changes to the original taste. If only due to manufacturing techniques and ingredients available. So, while the actual product might have changed, the logo and the design – visual markers of the brand promise – are 100% guaranteed to be timeless, rock solid, and true to the original. The proof is there.
How timeless is your brand? Will someone be writing about it in a century or more? They might be.
