Normaltown Brewing Company

I partnered with Normaltown Brewing Company to enhance their brand recognition and competitiveness within the Athens craft beer market. Through in-depth research and strategic analysis, I identified key marketing challenges and developed a refreshed brand strategy tailored to their goals. My work included refining their digital presence, optimizing social media content, and proposing creative campaign ideas to engage the local community. I also conducted a competitive audit and offered actionable recommendations to differentiate Normaltown from other local breweries. The result was a clearer brand identity, increased local awareness, and a stronger foundation for long-term marketing efforts.

Project Case Study

Project Date: July 2024– May 2025

Your Role: Project Manager

My role within this project was to lead communication between our client and our team. I also was responsible for task delegation, leading meetings, and overall strategy.

Project Overview

Within this project, we brought Normaltown Brewing Company (NBCo.) from what I call Zero to Hero. We helped them to create a strong brand identity with a new logo, conducted market and customer research, and through user-testing, we built them a full website.

The Problem

In May of 2024, NBCo. moved from a much smaller location to a larger one. With this move, our client David Abernathy was looking to strengthen the branding of NBCo.
After initial conversations with David, my team and I began diligently working to ensure that we could deliver David all he’s looking for. These things include.
Our goal was to take NBCo. to the next level by enhancing their overall branding. They needed a new logo, establish brand guidelines, a social media strategy, and a website.

The Solution

Our original plan:

When we first started this project, we had a lot of plans. We bright-eyed and bushy tailed. We wanted to accomplish a lot. The team and I originally split our project into three objectives ,or phases, each with their own task. They were the following:

Brand Identity: This included all of the things I had mentioned above. It’s the new branding, the logo, the color palette, the user research, and the website.
Awareness: This included things like SEO Implementation, Social Media Strategy, Influencer Marketing, Community Partnerships, PR Efforts with UGA organizations and Athens organizations.
Engagement: This phase included Newsletters, Responding to comments and DMs, User Generated Content, Loyalty Programs.

Don’t get me wrong, these were awesome goals! But we would be in for a rude awakening come Mini-Merge in December.

Nonetheless, we put our heads down and got to work. The first thing that we built was our design system. We knew this part would be absolutely vital to our work, and that we would not be able to accomplish anything until this was done. Kate and I began picking our colors, typography, photography, and building the brand voice. As we put these pieces together, Megan began creating the new logo, but we knew the real challenge would be creating our website.

The website:

After reading past Emerging Media case studies, we decided that the best platform to build out was Square Space. We chose this platform for several reasons:

It’s collaborative! My team and my client all have access to it.
It’s intuitive. My team and I had a really easy time putting all the necessary things onto the website. While we all have some experience in coding, none of us are developers, so using a website building platform has been the path of least resistance.
On the intuitive note, it’s really easy for our client to use. NBCo. doesn’t have the resources to higher someone to manage the website at the moment, but it’s so easy to add things and update the site.

The Alpha Version:

For the first iteration of our site, we pulled together all of the pieces of our design system to create it.

One of the main things we wanted to include was a process for customers to build their own beer. Almost like a customer suggestion box. To learn more about this process, please read my first Capstone Journey case study.

The Beta

Here are some picture of our Beta version! For this version, we got rid of the build your own beer process and added more relevant pages. We included a staff page, added elements to the home page, and updated some design elements.

This version was much closer to what our final product looks like! It included most of the same pages. It’s just missing some original content.

The Results:

The Final Version

Aaaannnnnd we’ve arrived! After much trial and error, here is the final version of our website! In order to get this point, we conducted several user test. This test included 8 participants that all have some reason or another to come to Athens, Georgia. We chose a variety of ages and relationships to Athens. Several were current students, some alumni, some just lived in the area, and other have children that attend UGA.

We learned several things from this user testing:

Make things easy to find! Our final version has a lot of the same information repeated. This might even seem like a mistake, but things like hours and location tend to be what people are looking for when they come to the site so we wanted to make sure that people had no trouble finding that info!
We didn’t need the staff page. We really wanted to highlight the staff on the website, but after talking to our participants we decided that it would probably be best to scratch that idea.
Picture, pictures, pictures. Throughout our testing we used stock imagery. We hadn’t been able to get content from the brewery so we just used some free images to place hold. We learned that people love to see photos of the brewery. They want to know what the overall vibe of the place is before they go in! Because we got so much feedback about this, we decided have a content day. The team and I dedicated 3 hours to shooting and filming!

Our final website turned out great! It’s easily accessible, easy to use, and filled with only the most necessary info. It’s filled with lots of information and fun pictures featuring the site!