Geography and branding in the craft beer industry

ABSTRACTPlace-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.KEYWORDS: craft beereconomic geographyregional studiesplace-based brandingmarketingconsumer perceptionnatural language processingJEL: L66M30R11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSWe are very grateful to this special issue's guest editors, Carolina Castaldi and Sandro Mendonça, for their direction and guidance. Ronald Davies also made several helpful comments to early drafts of this paper. Most of all, we thank our three anonymous reviewers who provided excellent feedback and countless suggestions to strengthen this article.DISCLOSURE STATEMENTNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. See https://www.brewbound.com/news/untappd-parent-company-next-glass-receives-investment2. See https://help.untappd.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034136372-How-are-ratings-determined-on-Untappd-3. For more information on FastLang, see https://spacy.io/universe/project/spacy_fastlang4. See https://help.untappd.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034018812-Supported-Brewery-Types5. European regions are classified according to the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS)-2 level schema; for further information on this, see https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/background6. For more information on spaCy, see https://spacy.io/7. For reporting of NER metrics, see https://spacy.io/models/en; and for spaCy’s performance against NLP benchmark datasets, see https://spacy.io/usage/facts-figures8. See https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/blob/master/spacy/glossary.py/. This definition is itself derived from the definitions put forth in the ACL MUC 7 task, https://aclanthology.org/M98-1028.pdf9. A handful of large breweries, Guinness, for example, are very tightly coupled with place. These global macrobreweries, however, do not compete against microbreweries in the same way, and so place may become less important to consumers in differentiating these products.