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In search of a Budweiser strategy, part 2: One creative idea

7/9/2014

Budweiser's critical business objective

Two consumer trends absolutely nailed the King of Beers: The growth of light beers-- Bud Light is now the #1 brand and six of the top-ten beers are light-beer brands-- together with the epic rise of craft beer formed a product-news pincer. Beer drinkers deserted Bud for "less filling/less taste" on one side, and "more flavor" on the other. As my advertising-legend friend, Laurel Cutler, used to say, the middle is definitely not where you want to be.

Since about 1988, Budweiser has been bleeding. The brand's once-commanding 25% share dropped to 8%, third-place behind Coors Light. The bucket isn't leaking; it's been turned on its side. Stemming the losses must be the brand's #1 priority.

Somewhere along the decline, Budweiser effectively became old news, a brand many of today's beer drinkers felt no longer offered them anything of interest. Nearly generic beer-fun advertising campaigns like "Grab some Buds" didn't help.

Attempts at me-too-ing craft beer-- with more flavorful limited- edition beers and boasts about "local brewing"-- were similarly ill-fated.

(Note: Not a video link. Budweiser's website has declared this video "private.")

In place of all that, in our last article we searched for a provocative, unique, fact-based distinction for the Budweiser brand. Uncovering and highlighting this feature, and joining it to a compelling (and unique) brand premise, can be the key to successful strategy. It's a behavior-change prerequisite.

If the feature is real news, so much the better.

The feature:

Budweiser still uses the original brewer's yeast culture strain from 1876. The very same culture. Yeast defines the taste of beer and it can be easily adulterated, so the brewery has safeguarded this culture for 130 years, while keeping it secret from outside eyes. All of this means every ounce of Budweiser ever brewed shares a taste-defining common connection.

One creative idea:

Call it inter-generational jiu-jitsu: Find a way to turn Budweiser's association with the past to its advantage. But how?

Each new generation strives mightily-- often violently-- to find its own identity, and so to separate itself from every previous generation. Yet at some point in our journey, nearly every one of us also discovers-- often reluctantly-- that certain cross-generation ties still bind us. They are links, not to the past in general, but to specific bits of joy somehow conveyed to us through the years, often without our noticing. And they are ties to specific people.

Loyalty can be re-built, but it must happen a beer at a time.
Re-kindling a fondness for a brand takes just that: the advertising equivalent of kindling. It looks for a spark of re-connection.

In this idea-- depicted below in four "showboards" designed to give it form, but not necessarily to serve as advertising-- Budweiser captures some of those bits of inherited joy. And suggests that the unchanged taste of its beer may well be among them.

Remember that the primary target for this effort is current Budweiser drinkers. After them come those who may have "partially" left the brand by granting it fewer beer-drinking occasions. But the premise may also speak to a larger cohort: People skeptical of the trendy... overdone tastes that come into vogue, but do not endure. This advertising idea aims to supply all these beer drinkers with a provocative, factual reason to give the crisp, clean taste of Bud another try.

Because certain tastes never change.

"My dad was definitely not perfect.
He and I are vastly different people.
But I have to admit, certain tastes of mine--
like my love for the blues-- come from him."

"He didn't take any crap. Neither do I."

"Trabajó duro.
Ese era su regalo más grande para mí."

"He wasn't much for 'girly-girl stuff.'"

The desired response...

But what will the craft-beer folks say?

Here's the deal: The focus of this strategy is squarely on lapsed Budweiser drinkers. So the opinions of committed craft-beer drinkers on all this are largely irrelevant. Anyway, as they say in social media, "Haters gonna hate."

Besides, in spite of all their professed "cicerone" expertise, what do they really know about "crisp, clean taste," anyway?

In search of a Budweiser strategy, part 1: Fact-finding

7/2/2014

In my years on beer, one marketing discipline I learned came as an unexpected gift from a new Coors executive who arrived with no experience whatsoever in beer. The running assumption: when he tried applying his toothpaste-marketing wisdom on beer, he would fail miserably. A decade later, the remarkable turnaround and growth of literally all the Coors brands proved him right. So much for assumptions.

Truth and creativity

This guy preached that brand strategy was the most critical creative project for a brand. Indeed, he'd say, great strategy will overcome average execution, but even stellar execution will fail if the strategy behind it is poor.

To succeed, strategy creation had to begin by seeking truth inside the brand. The energizing idea: Somewhere inside every good brand is the key to its strategic success. Find this differentiating factual tidbit, link it to a logical-yet-provocative promise, and consumers can be enticed to look-- or take a second look-- at your brand.

In practice, this meant, not days of looking, but sometimes weeks. In one case I recall, it took months. Every bit of brand history, every aspect of brewing recipe and process, every street legend, every custom, every consumer-use test or audit, all that and more got pored over. No detail was regarded as inconsequential. But the point wasn't to fill up binders with data. You were looking for distinctive, ideally unique brand assets. The sorts of compelling things only one brand could say.

At the end of the process, bringing creative judgement to bear, you arrived at a "what if I told you" premise, a new link between a distinctive product fact and consumer need. Here lies the power to change minds, and change purchase behavior.

Finding the truth

To see how all this can work in practice, rather than recalling an example from the past, let's look at a current example, Budweiser. There are few beer brands that could use a sound marketing strategy more.

Of course, we can't be privy to all the many brewery research studies or every product fact for the King of Beers, so our effort here won't be perfect. But for illustrative purposes, we can work with what is available to us and see where it leads.

Looking at Budweiser's product facts presented on the brand's websites, one notion stood out as a bit different and unusual. Like beechwood aging, it was unique, but it seemed more closely and easily linked to the flavor of the beer. The notion also spoke to brand history, itself a proud aspect of Budweiser. Unlike beechwood aging, this feature had actually been consistent across the entire history of the brand.

And maybe most intriguing of all, to our knowledge, this particular fact had never played any important role in the brand's advertising; it was new to me, and I expect, would be new to the rest of America. New information like this, as any psychologist will tell you, can be key to getting people to change their behavior. As in returning to a beer brand they'd abandoned, or perhaps even trying that brand for the first time.

The intriguing product fact:

Budweiser still uses the original brewer's yeast culture strain from 1876. The very same culture. Yeast defines the taste of beer and it can be easily adulterated, so the brewery has safeguarded this culture for 130 years, while keeping it secret from outside eyes. All of this means every ounce of Budweiser ever brewed shares a taste-defining common connection.

Now comes the second creative-strategy challenge: Marry this new and interesting fact to a premise that captures the consumer's interest and serves the brand's marketing goals. In Budweiser's current decline, that would mean strengthening current drinkers' affinity for the brand. Plugging some of the leaks in the bucket.

Like every creative act, there's always a bit of a leap involved here.

In our next installment, we'll offer such a leap.

Forward>>

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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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In search of a Budweiser strategy, part 2: One creative idea

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