Little Creatures emerges on schedule

Little Creatures Brewing Pty Ltd in the heart of Fremantle has taken a patient approach to its business since it was established nearly five years ago, but it’s a methodology owner Howard Cearns believes has worked and suited the company’s brand and product range.

During the past year, according to Mr Cearns, the Little Creatures team has maintained its strategy of broad distribution at a controlled pace.

In the process the company has climbed from position 13 to position two in the WA Business News emerging brands survey.

“The culture of the company is not about pushing sales, but rather letting it happen,” Mr Cearns said.

“The product is very important to the brand, something a lot of marketing people don’t take into consideration.”

Little Creatures’ branding is about the whole experience of visiting the brewery, or for the company’s interstate and international customers, sampling its selection of craft brews.

“There has been endorsement from the industry and traders have been great advocates,” Mr Cearns said.

“The culture of the company is not aggressive, rather we concentrate on our passion for the product.

“We attract creative people to the organisation and people with an open and honest ethic.

“When you visit the brewery it is about the smells and noise, seeing the packaging lines and the brewing of beer and the predominantly young people we employ and train.”

And rather than focusing on marketing and advertising, Mr Cearns said Little Creatures had opted to take a more hands-on approach, while also contributing in other ways to the industry.

“We do a lot in the field and support trade,” he said. “Tastings, point-of-sale material, and we support lots of events.”

One of Little Creatures’ advertising creations was the well-received cinema campaign ‘free hugs’.

“It was very different and very ‘Fremantle’,” Mr Cearns said.

In the ads, a camera follows a man around the streets of Fremantle, including the wharf, cafe strip and inside Little Creatures brewery, wearing a sandwich board sign that reads “FREE HUGS”. The man approaches people he meets at random and offers them hugs, with unpredictable and often humorous results. A message caption at the end of the ad says “Open up a little” beside a bottle of Little Creatures Pale Ale.

“It ran in the second-half of last year and was very successful and we had lots of feedback,” Mr Cearns said. “We have also advertised in some ad shells around the WA metropolitan area and specialist food and beverage publications throughout Australia.”

It is all about how fast you want things to move, according to Mr Cearns, who said positioning the Little Creatures product was the brewer’s first challenge.

The Little Creatures brand has also benefited from being classified as a craft beer – boutique, exclusive and somewhat rare – a definition that has worked to its advantage.

“Traditional brand theory is what people experience when they first come into contact with the product,” Mr Cearns said.

“The Little Creatures brand is about really exciting people, a fresh culture, something different, quality and exceptional beer, the brewery itself, its physical location, the ingredients used, and being young at heart.

“It is the whole package.”

And anyone who has visited Little Creatures knows the people who work there constitute a big part of what drives the brand.

Mr Cearns, who also established creative marketing company brain-CELLS, is a partner in Little Creatures with Phil Sexton and Nic Trimboli.

It was a natural progression, especially for Mr Cearns and Mr Sexton, who worked at Matilda Bay in the 1980s.

“We had been in the beer game a long time and knew the industry quite well,” Mr Cearns said.

“We had talked about it for a long time, and Little Creatures was in the making for about three years before it actually started.”

And the success of the Little Creatures brand has expanded globally, with export markets in the UK, Denmark and an October launch planned for New Zealand.