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Zima rebirth? Pete Coors and HeyBeerDan disagree on what went wrong last time

2/17/2017

 
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How long ago was it?

It should tell you something that nowadays, "Zima" auto-corrects as "Zika." 


Still, according to Advertising Age, Zima is poised for a comeback with cases of the stuff already arriving in distributors' warehouses. This second-coming begs the question of what killed the brand the first time. There is some debate about that.

According to none other than Pete Coors--who is quoted in the AdAge article--this is how the brand died... 
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The author of this blog is a friend of Pete's. We worked together for many years--including during the Zima days (although that brand was assigned to a different ad agency operation). And "client trust?" We often carried loaded shotguns alongside one another in the field without a worry. Pete's a good man. But his Zima assessment misses the mark. 
Zima last time

Zima was created in the early nineties at the behest of Pete's senior marketing executive at the time. In many ways a visionary, this marketing heavyweight wanted to broaden the brewery's business base, so as not to be forever going toe-to-toe with Budweiser and Miller. He challenged the highly qualified Coors technical people to use their considerable skill and creativity. The mission: Create a next-generation, non-beer alcoholic beverage.

​Their answer was to brew beer, but in the last stages of the process, to filter out all beer flavor and color. Then, flavoring could be added to the resultant clear, carbonated "base liquid," so the new product could taste however the brewers wanted. Thus, "clearmalt" was born, and while that generic nomenclature never gained any traction, every subsequent "flavored malt beverage"--from Mike's Hard Lemonade, to Smirnoff Ice, to Henry's Hard Soda, and many more--is kin to Zima. Invented in the Coors labs, Zima represents the single most innovative product-development effort ever in the beer business.

Where Pete gets it wrong

As to marketing, Zima's launch advertising was remarkably successful. The "What is it?" curiosity-based premise saw the brand selling 1.3 million barrels in its first year, grabbing well over a share-point of the entire beer category.
Largely on the strength of its advertising, Zima reportedly generated 70% trial among beer drinkers, an astonishing feat. But longer term repeat-purchases, which dictate whether a brand becomes a business, would be critical. For a beverage, that means the taste-experience is everything. 

The flavor that had been chosen for Zima performed quite well in pre-launch "first sip" research. But what apparently had not been sufficiently evaluated was the satisfaction after two or three servings in a row. How would drinkers evaluate the product experience after a month or more of routine consumption?

​In a comprehensive analysis of the brand's rise and fall, a Bloomberg article from 1997 captured Zima's key failure: "Almost nobody came back for seconds." Every year after its launch, the brand experienced declines. 

Not really too clever

To be sure, the errors Pete cited for Zima were marketing mistakes. Ditching the lovely fluted bottle, primarily to save a few cents on glass, would only further erode what little brand loyalty remained. Zima Gold was even worse: an expensive, stillborn line extension. At the convention at which it was first presented, every bottle of the stuff that was served to distributors was just barely sampled. A first-sip disaster.

​But both these marketing calls were made late in the brand's life, more as last-ditch Hail Mary shots than well-planned brand-building. It wasn't about marketing people being too clever at that point, but rather, too desperate.
One marketing guy's take

As Pete suggested, this marketing guy blames a faulty Zima product married to successful marketing. But that wasn't a common sin at Coors. In fact, other Coors brands sometimes had it the other way around. 
Coors Light, arguably the perfect light beer and a wildly successful brand, was the victim more than once of ridiculously poor marketing judgement, and advertising that did little for the brand. The "Twins" ads come to mind. Yet the brand stayed healthy because the beer's taste experience was so much better than those tasteless ads. 

​And that leaves us with three "marketing guy" truths to mull over:

1. Bad products can't be saved by good ads.

2. Good products can survive bad ads.

​3. And a good product with good ads? Well, that's a beautiful thing.

And one more thing: Let's hope the Zima being delivered now has been reformulated. 

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A-B's final two Super Bowl ads: More Bud Light fail, and a win from Michelob Ultra

2/4/2017

 
We're conflicted. On the one hand, Anheuser-Busch's pre-game release of all its Super Bowl ads will allow the HeyBeerDan editorial staff to sit back and enjoy our lavish game-day party without having to critique ads. But on the other hand, we've had our work cut out for us during the normally uneventful run-up week.

Already, we've recorded our impressions of three Anheuser-Busch ads: the Budweiser ad, the Busch beer ad, and the first of Bud Light ads. Loyal readers will know that, as of this point, we score A-B zero-for-three, sadly extending the brewery's long and disappointing Super Bowl ad history.

But hope springs eternal, especially when it comes to Anheuser-Busch's seemingly inexhaustible Super Bowl ad budget. Which brings us to the two just-released A-B ads, filling two-and-a-half more commercial minutes on the most expensive program of the year.

Bud Light's dog

The first is a 90-second Bud Light ad airing in addition to the already seen 60-second ad. When we heard there would be a second ad for the brand, we mistakenly assumed it would be a sister to the first one, maybe in longer form. So we thought back to what was in that ad. But, try as we might, we couldn't actually remember anything at all about the first ad. Never a good sign. We had to go check our archives.

As it turns out, the new, even-longer-form ad is different from, but only a bit better than the other one. At least it's more memorable, thanks to the Spuds-as-Dickensian-ghost device...
Where the ad fails is in the message it leaves with viewers. "I remember the dog ghost" is about all the Bud Light brain trust can expect to get from the audience. Why they'd assume this will sell beer is sketchy at best. The only potentially distinctive statement about the beer--that all your friends will like it--is spoken once, and so buried under an 89-second avalanche of unrelated dog-ghost stuff. 

Those keeping score at home will note that, as of this point, A-B's SuperBowl team of ads is void of a single star player. 

The best saved for last

​Unless we're surprised with a yet-to-be-debuted ad, the final ad from the St. Louis brewery belongs to Michelob Ultra. And where the other four have failed to register any distinctiveness for the beers, how Mich Ultra beer is distinctive is precisely the focus this ad.
A low-carb-low-calorie beer for fitness-conscious folks whose favorite place "where everybody knows their name" is a gym, not a bar, is a clever delivery of a distinctive-beer message. No other beer can live in this place. It's so linked to Michelob Ultra that competitor MillerCoors simply gave up trying to create an imitative new brand to try and horn in. So Michelob Ultra continues as one of the very hottest brands in the industry.

Now, do you suppose selling the distinctiveness of the beer inside those Mich Ultra bottles--as has been done pretty consistently in its ad campaign for years--has anything to do with all that success?

(It was a rhetorical question.)

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    The Author

    Dan Fox is a real beer guy.

    For more than half his 30-year career at ad agency, Foote, Cone & Belding, he ran the Coors Brewing account. Leading a group of dozens of advertising professionals, Dan also personally wrote the Pete Coors "Somewhere near Golden, Colorado" commercials, designed the Coors NASCAR graphics, authored sales-convention speeches, and most important of all, formulated marketing strategy for virtually every Coors brand, including Coors Light, Keystone, Killian's Irish Red and more. His proudest achievement? "Our team had every Coors brand growing at once."

    Over his advertising career, Dan was personally involved in the analysis, planning and creation of thousands of ads for a variety of products and services. By way of this blog, he freely shares his expertise about what works, and what doesn't, when it comes to selling beer.

    If you're in the beer-marketing business--or just interested in the subject--you may want to read what "HeyBeerDan" has to say.

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