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Advertising to millennials? Avoid these two mistakes

7/20/2016

 
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Millennials: Winning them over is every beer marketer's dream
Beer brands bend over backward these days to lure the millennials, coveting business from this newest young-adult group. But the beer marketer's most common lament has been how difficult it is to connect with these hipsters. So brewers turn to ad agencies, consultants, and a host of other know-it-alls who promise insights on how millennials can be brought into the fold. But with all that, no major beer brand would profess to have yet cracked the code.

Not for lack of trying...
In these two ads--and more like them--every aspect of the portrayal of the millennials seems to have originated from one of those glossy consultant presentations. Just count all the millennial-specific devices and images baked into 30 seconds, every one designed to hook the tricky audience. So we get: Beards. Tats. Hip music. Clever banter. Outdoorsy activity. Downscale dress. Low-budget fun. No makeup on the ladies. Overall, a minimalist zeitgeist.

And yet, as we said, no major beer would claim to have made any impressive inroads with these 20-somethings. Ads like the ones above apparently yield no appreciable results. 

Maybe the consultants should be fired.

An instructional video on advertising to millennials

As a rule, we generally avoid citing cross-category case studies. But since we made that rule, we get to point out the occasional exception. Especially when that exception's so much fun to watch, and more important, so brilliant.

Here's a just-released long-form ad from the good folks at Chevrolet. The target for their new Cruze automobile? Why, millennials, of course. But just look at how Chevy's (purported) advertising efforts to capture and identify with the millennial crowd fail miserably... and then triumph magnificently.
Avoiding mistake #1

Just holding an advertising mirror up to millennials is not effective, and may well be counterproductive. As the Chevy ad cleverly demonstrates, they do not react well to being stereotyped. That's probably true of any demographic group, but this latest bunch of young adults seems to particularly dislike it. Patronize them with ads offering only superficial renderings, and be prepared to see see them ignore your brand. Had the Miller High Life and Leinenkugel's folks understood this, they might have made better, more effective ads.

More important: Avoiding mistake #2

What did the young adults respond to in the Cruze ad? Hipness in its language? The "feel" of the ad? An emotional hook some clever ad guy came up with? Nope, nope, and nope. Instead of ad-agency flim-flam, the distinctive features of the automobile were the key. Said another way, the millennials' interest was captured by the distinctiveness of the product. 

Could it be that provocatively presenting a beer's distinctiveness is the very best way to bring millennials to your brand? That an honest, but still engaging presentation of what makes one beer brand more desirable than another will (gasp!) sell beer? That substance counts more than style?

Wow. Wouldn't that be something?!?

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BigBeer fires on craft beer: A shot across the... label

7/13/2016

 
For years, craft beer was on the offensive against BigBeer. Social media posts in the billions lambasted the large brewers' brands with invective like "yellow fizz" and "factory beer." On website after website, the small brewers contrasted their "artisan" brewing procedures with the "mass produced" big brands implying--or stating outright--that they produced better quality beer. Their industry association stoked the small-is-better mentality.

Until about two years ago, BigBeer just took it. Like an overweight prize fighter pinned against the ropes, the major brands covered their faces and just endured the assault. Possibly fearing being labeled bullies, there was no counter-punching. Meanwhile, craft beer patted itself on the back for becoming--in total--larger than Budweiser.

Then something changed.

First it was Budweiser's 2015 Superbowl debut of its "Made the Hard Way" ad campaign. Abandoning years of entertainment-based ads, Bud called out pumpkin-peach ale as a stand-in for every craft beer. The King of Beers effectively mocked its countless smaller competitors as precious in their manner and odd in their flavored formulations. Product facts replaced pointless entertainment, and Budweiser saw its best business trends in twenty years.

The craft beer world whined.

This year, Heineken followed suit and, like Budweiser, abandoned entertainment-based advertising replacing it with focused, product-fact driven ads. In place of mini-movies set in distant places, spokesman, Benicio del Toro, tried to get the Heineken brewmaster to add craft-beer-like ingredients to the recipe. "No f*cking way," was the crisp response. Implied: Craft beer flavoring is un-pure.

The craft beer world whined some more.

Well, get ready for some mega-whining.

Just announced by the Beer Insititute, the lobbying group representing BigBeer, is an assault on craft beer as pointed as Budweiser's and Heineken's ads, and in all likelihood, even more effective. Rarely, if ever, has BigBeer acted in unison as they did yesterday. Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, HeinekenUSA, and Constellation Brands Beer Division "will provide freshness dating, and disclose ingredients via a list, a reference to a website with the information, or a QR code on the label or secondary packaging." North American Breweries (Labatt) endorsed the move, and even Craft Brew Alliance (Redhook) came aboard with its eight or so small brands. That leaves just the craft beers from about 4,000 other brewers to join the party.
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Something in common: Transparency
Two powerful shots against craft

Behind the consumer-knowledge motivation offered in the press release "to demonstrate a commitment to quality and transparency" (not coincidentally, two strong appeals among the millennial crowd) lies a pair of direct competitive shots against smaller brands.

First, had the move only included freshness-dating, it would have been a blow to the little guys. Freshness information can be unkind to them. A common lament of retailers and consumers alike has long been "skunky" craft beer left to languish--and deteriorate--in stores month after month. Without a clear freshness date on the label, this out-of-date beer can hide on the shelf. So the breweries avoid having to buy it back, an expense they can ill-afford. Even if craft brands choose not to add freshness-dating, beer drinkers seeing it on so many other beer labels will certainly begin to wonder how old the date-free beer brands are. Boom.
PictureSome of these facts will appear on all BigBeer labels
Second, the degree of transparency and the comprehensiveness of the label-facts BigBeer will display pose a new hurdle for the small brands. "Participating brewers and importers will voluntarily list calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat and alcohol by volume on their beer products by including a serving facts..." said the release. For a small brewer, the laboratory work and expense required to determine and record all these facts is not insignificant. What's more, the craft guys delight in their myriad of offerings which, if subjected to this labeling, would compound the difficulty and expense. And, we also wonder, how many craft brands are using artificial flavoring which would have to be disclosed? Boom. Boom.

Between a rock and a hard place

Effective competition means finding a way to make your offering appear superior to the other guy's. Indeed, that's what "yellow fizz" was all about. In this latest move we see BigBeer--some would say, finally--firing back with gusto against the no-longer-small-in-aggregate craft beers. In baseball parlance, this is "chin music" for the pumpkin-peach ale crowd.

Welcome to the big leagues.


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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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