Capabilities_

  • &Creative,
  • &Accelerate,
  • &Media

Hawkstone - The UK's fastest growing beer brand

image
Kaleb clutching a pint glass of Hawkstone beer

Insight

Hard to make. Easy to drink.

Hawkstone was launched in 2021 as a challenger beer brand, born from a partnership between celebrity farmer Jeremy Clarkson and a local Cotswolds brewery. The brand faced a critical business challenge: an over reliance on a single, high profile personality.

The "&Shaped Idea" we created is the platform 'Hard to make. Easy to drink.' This is the brand’s strategic foundation that seamlessly integrates long-term brand building with a social-first performance engine.



Hawkstone OOH poster

Idea

The brand’s platform ‘Hard to Make. Easy to Drink’ champions the back-breaking reality of actual British farming to sell delicious beer, putting farmers front and centre.

Instead of just talking about this, we created a new entertainment property that embodied it: The Hawkstone Farmers' Choir. We transformed 40 real farmers into national heroes, engineering a cultural phenomenon that saw them win Britain's Got Talent. This was the fame-driving, brand-building component that moved Hawkstone far beyond its initial reliance on a single celebrity.



A picture of the farmers choir singing outside the pub holding beer glasses. Jeremy Clarkson and his farmer Kaleb form part of the choir.

Hawkstone Farmer's Choir Case Study Film

Implementation

This brand story is powered by a disruptive, social-first performance engine. Our strategy is to create a constant stream of social-first content designed to build a community, tap into cultural moments, and using the algorithm and audience to our advantage.

This is supported with performance media via our AI content engine, where audiences are segmented and converted using Open Intelligence (WPP Open’s data platform).

CRM, web flows and performance media also upsell subscription models to relevant audiences.



Results

Impact

Our strategy built the most-followed beer brand in the world on instagram and TikTok, driving over 1.1 million new followers. This huge, engaged social community became our most powerful performance channel, directly fuelling Hawkstone's growth to become the UK's fastest-growing beer brand.