Geography and Branding in the Craft Beer Industry

Place-based branding strategies are important marketing tools for both regions and firms and take advantage of consumers’ embrace of the local in response to globalisation. Craft-brewing is a particularly salient user of these strategies and provides ample data. We use a dataset of breweries, their marketing language and their consumer ratings to study the effectiveness of place-based branding. We use named entity recognition to count references to geography, and measure how these references impact ratings. We find a strong, positive link between the number of place-based labels and a brewery’s rating, suggesting consumers are receptive to placed-based branding.