Tour de Fat — New Belgium Brewery Does Marketing Right

This past Saturday, my wife and I attended New Belgium Brewery’s Tour de Fat Seattle. The event was a celebration of the bicycle. All beer sales from the event went to benefit the Bicycle Alliance of Washington. Personally, I was more than happy to help out such a good cause by disposing of a few Fat Tires. While at the event, I realized just how great of a marketing event it was for New Belgium.

One of the most successful aspects of the Tour de Fat was the fact that New Belgium did not set out to create a community. Too often when it comes to things like social networks and online communities, brands and organizations alike attempt to create a community around their product or cause. Most of the time, this approach is unsustainable as most people are already apart of so many different communities and don’t need one more. For instance, I am a part of the rock climbing community, the cycling community, the beer-lover community, the religious community, and so on. What New Belgium was successful at was creating an event that enabled existing communities to come together. Even if you were not a beer drinker, the Tour de Fat offered a wonderful opportunity for the bicycling community of Seattle to come together and have a good time for a good cause. For those of us in both the beer-loving and bike-riding communities, the event bridged those communities in a really great way.

Second, New Belgium’s event was focused on doing good. Too many marketing efforts are focused on ROI or measurable outcomes. By focusing on raising money for the local cycling community, the Tour de Fat was not an event that was about these things. It was not, as a lot of corporate events are, a celebration of the brand. Instead, as it claimed, it was about celebrating the bicycle. There was no question who sponsored the event, though. If you drank beer at the event, it was New Belgium’s beer. New Belgium was in no way trying to downplay their involvement with the event. However, this aspect was not at all off-putting. I appreciated the fact that a beer company from Colorado cared enough about an issue that is important to me to put on such an event. Maybe I’m a sucker, but the marketing worked on me. The event makes me feel really good about purchasing Fat Tire beer. I, like most others, enjoy supporting companies who share the same values as I do.

When it comes to marketing–in meat space or online–more companies need to think like New Belgium. I really can’t speak to the rest of New Belgium’s marketing efforts, but in the case of the Tour de Fat, the company acted like a fellow citizen of the world. When companies realize that they, too, must live in this world, they will most certainly begin to do things a little differently. That realization, as simple as it sounds, is, in my opinion, at the core of social responsibility.