Business schools love case studies for their ability to bring a measure of the real world into the classroom. But no matter how well-presented, a case study can never fully capture the lived experience. Believe me, I know. 

In the early 1990s, I was leading the Foote, Cone & Belding team responsible for the Coors account, one of the agency's largest. So when I got word a new top marketing guy was headed to the brewery, my outward bonhomie masked a distinct spike of apprehension. Changes in senior client people often lead to changes in ad agencies. 

There were other unnerving indications. The new guy was arriving from outside the company. His long string of past successes-- each time working with some other big ad agency-- did little to stifle my butterflies. Maybe most unsettling of all, he had no beer experience. 

A new philosophy

In the end, none of it mattered. Because what he did possess was a clear philosophy of advertising. And he was passionate about it. He had seen it work across a number of business categories, from soap to orange juice. And he fully intended to see it drive our advertising for Coors Light.  

Simply put, he believed advertising worked when it imparted some product truth that would cause people to be interested enough to try the brand. Advertising that didn't build the business wasn't worth running, he said. Soft "image advertising" -- quite popular at the time, especially for beer brands-- was dead on arrival. Nor would he approve ads that simply entertained, no matter how in vogue they were with advertising creative types. Any "fun" in our ads had to help bring the product's distinctiveness to life. None of this was negotiable.

To say that our getting-to-know-the-man learning curve was steep would be an understatement. He was opinionated, sometimes breathtakingly direct, and quick to judge. He didn't suffer fools, as the saying goes. 

Even after we replaced a few creative directors who were vehemently opposed to change, it still took our agency team a number of tries before we finally brought his philosophy into the work we presented. And only then did we get his approval for a new Coors Light campaign.

Over-sized fun in the mountains, from the one beer shipped cold to tap the pure taste of the Rockies. One of the marketing guy's key mandates-- that no other brand could be easily substituted in the ads-- was clearly met. "Tap the Rockies" ran for nearly eight years during which Coors Light sales grew consistently, achieving record levels, and passing Miller Lite. 

The year 2002 saw the retirement of the top Coors marketing client. (He now teaches advertising students.) His replacement was a promotions guy who had beer experience. But when it came to advertising, he shared none of his predecessor's philosophical commitment. He actually mocked it as unnecessarily intellectual.

Another new philosophy

In this new guy's view, making Coors Light "cool" was the simple goal. His philosophy-- though he would never articulate it in so many words-- was equally simple. He was addicted to buzz. He wanted hip, edgy, talked-about advertising. The ad agency team I led would either deliver that sort of work, or there'd be a new agency.

Against my own better judgement (but with a strong sense of self-preservation), we set to work, and pretty quickly delivered the sort of advertising he wanted. For many creative people, "hip and edgy" with no other requirements, amounted to "creative freedom." Developing ideas like that was easy. The only product-differentiating fact allowed in the ads was the somewhat cryptic "cold down easy," a brief after-thought he allowed as a sop to me. Otherwise, unlike the Tap the Rockies ads, any beer brand could've run these commercials. Fun times. Hot music. Parking-lot football. Pretty girls, not least of all the buzz-commanding "twins."

But as we've noted here before, buzz ain't biz. 

Before very long, the comely twins, wild partying, lyrical wingman and other such ad tricks failed to generate much buzz. "Cool" went cold, as it invariably does. Worst of all, sales results soured so badly, Coors Light surrendered its ranking back to Miller Lite. Before it could reach its third season, the "Rock on" advertising disappeared, and so did the marketing guy who had championed it. He departed the company without ceremony.

Some possible lessons-learned from all this?

#3  David Ogilvy really knew what he was talking about.

Craft fears

Over the past year or so, there's been a fair amount of public speculation that the craft-beer category might be peaking. In December, Business Insider published a decidedly cautionary outlook for the craft industry. Two other independent sources signaled more caution. GuestMetrics reported 2013 on-premise craft beer sales up just 3.8%, slowing and well below the rate for off-premise retail stores. Even more striking, Restaurant Sciences, reported a 4% drop in craft-beer sales in a single quarter in their monitored restaurant/bar sample. These on-premise trend reports fueled the growing unease. For good reason.

Any proven weakening in on-premise sales--where these beers have been riding a consistent upward trend for years-- would be particularly unsettling to craft brewers. As beer sales folks know, ordering a beer at the bar, or in a restaurant, is the most brand-conspicuous buying moment. Unlike the retail store-shelf, brand-calls at the bar are least influenced by price, most influenced by what the drinker believes his public beer-choice says about him. So, on-premise is where beer brands always weaken first.

Friendly competition 

Until now, if you'd asked craft brewers who their competition is, they pretty much would've all responded the same way. Something like: "The cr@p sold by Big Beer." And they would've been right, at least about the Big Beer part. Because until now, craft beers were blissfully free to concentrate on one collective competitive set: the mega-brands. 

As a result, craft brewers were also free to devote little, if any, energy to battling each other. They were a happy band of like-minded Davids, merry allies at war with the evil, monolithic, Big Beer Goliath. And to the delight of many pundits, these Davids were winning. But to mix metaphors a bit, a good part of their momentum lay beneath the surface, where a rising craft-beer tide was lifting all the Davids in the same boat at once.

Now comes an in-market claxon that one important David is abandoning the happy-boat.

New Sam Adams ad calls out IPAs, porters, stouts, brown ales among "beers (that) have come and... gone"

The TV ad below does not appear on the Sam Adams website. But it has run on the MLB Network. It was captured off-the-air and subsequently posted on YouTube. That's why the sound is tinny and the picture's a little hazy. Clear as can be, however, is the distinctly competitive message: Sam Adams, by far the largest and most successful David of them all, is firing a marketing cannonball at other craft beers that have come to market since the 1980s.

Talk about rocking the boat.

This shot-across-their-bow signals a coming-of-age moment for craft brewers. The challenges and pains of real head-to-head brand competition-- from which they have been protected for so long-- now seem headed their way. Market historians may well look back on this as the beginning of the "throwdown among craft beers" sagely predicted by Business Insider. Still, in spite of the consternation it may provoke among the craft crowd, this development should be welcomed, not whined about. 

"Small" is no guarantee of "good"

In marketing as in nature, no upward trend lasts forever. Brand-to-brand competition is the natural path to weed out the inefficient, the less desirable, and the redundant options in any market. Even the most rabid aficionado will admit there are craft-beer brands that don't deserve to live. The market, in its natural progression toward maturity, will take care of that.

Competition is why America saw some 700 brewers disappear since Prohibition. And competition is why a significant number of today's craft brewers will inevitably go the same way. For now, though-- to paraphrase a hero of the American Revolution who doesn't yet have a beer named after him-- the fight has only just begun.