Athletic Brewing, the non-alcoholic beer maker that helped turn the category from a novelty into a fixture, has appointed Dan Kleinman as its chief marketing officer, effective in September. Kleinman arrives from Deutsch Family Wine and Spirits, where he spent nearly a decade and served as CMO, overseeing the growth of the Josh Cellars wine brand. Before that he spent sixteen years in marketing roles at the alcohol giant Diageo. It is, in other words, a resume built almost entirely inside the drinks industry Athletic exists to offer an alternative to.
The hire follows a stretch of rapid growth and heavier marketing spend for Athletic, which has leaned on sponsorships and big-reach campaigns to move non-alcoholic beer into the mainstream. Bringing in a marketer who spent his career scaling alcohol brands is a bet that the playbook for building a beer brand still applies, even when the beer has had the alcohol taken out.
The Cr(af)ted Take
Talent follows opportunity, and the people who spent their careers marketing alcohol do not switch sides for a fad. When a senior marketer leaves a wine-and-spirits company to run marketing at a non-alcoholic brewer, that is a read on where this person thinks the growth is, and it is worth more than any forecast slide. The category used to borrow credibility from the alcohol world. Now it is starting to hire it away.
It also says something about how the drinks get built from here. The first wave of alcohol-free brands were often founded by outsiders and true believers, people who came to it from wellness or from their own sobriety. The next wave will increasingly be run by professionals who know exactly how a Josh Cellars or a Guinness got to scale, and who now intend to do the same thing without the alcohol. That is how a movement becomes an industry: not when the drinks get good, which already happened, but when the people who build the biggest brands in the world decide this is where they want to work.
Original reporting: BevNET →