The Brewdog Playbook. After legal threats James Watt apologises (again)
On Monday BBC Scotland broadcast a programme on Brewdog (available on IPlayer). The programme had three elements. It looked at Brewdog’s marketing and PR efforts, some of which have worked very well, others rather less so. It also looked at Brewdog’s business model. There wasn’t much that was specifically new here. The point was that the details will have reached a far wider audience than the ‘beer bubble’ that already knows about them. In particular since Brewdog plans to float itself as a public company there is the question of how much Equity for Punks shareholders might make from this. The answer depends on what value Brewdog floats at as TSG the private equity investor has a guaranteed percentage return. EFP people don’t. There were also some interesting details about James Watt’s personal financial dealings. These of course are separate to Brewdog
The third part of the programme focused on a number of testimonies from former (and one current) Brewdog worker about the toxic workplace culture. They echoed but much more directly the points made by Punks With Purpose last year.
At the time Watt initially reacted by saying these were malcontents who were sacked for misconduct or theft and had a grievance against the company. That didn’t go down too well so he changed tack and announced a major exercise to review the culture of Brewdog and suggest changes, carried out by a third party. That reported recently and Watt apologised and promised to address issues.
On the BBC Scotland programme the same pattern repeated itself. At first James Watt denied all the issues raised and claimed again they were made by ill intentioned malcontents. Legal action was threatened. It got a good deal of media coverage but little of it was good.
So again Watt has changed tack. He now agrees some of the staffing issues mentioned in the BBC programme might have had substance, apologised and promised to address issues.
The details of that are here:
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