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"We aren't to be blamed for our crappy trends:" MillerCoors hits new heights in the blame game

7/18/2017

 
PictureMillerCoors CEO presentation?
The MillerCoors CEO just went public with what he thinks is ailing the beer business. Here's his list from a Beer Marketers Insights account:

- An "astonishing" amount of change;
- A host of distractions;
- Companies whose specific mission is to disrupt the beer industry;
- Amazon's move to purchase Whole Foods;
- Ongoing government investigation of aluminum-industry pricing;
- Self-serving icons (from craft brewers) touting so-called independence;
- "Internal assassins" (craft brewers) being critical of the beer industry;
- Brewers who are also in the wine and spirits businesses.

Quite a list of the sorts of forces MillerCoors is fond of calling "headwinds" whenever they need to explain away poor performance to Wall Street.

But missing from the list is what the CEO thinks is ailing one of his largest bonds, Miller Lite. For that placing of blame, we turn to the brewer's marketing honcho. So what does he think has been missing?  ​
"We have the right brand purpose, the right brand world and the right creative to bring it all together. Now we have the right team in place to capitalize on the opportunity in front of us,"

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Miller Lite's "right creative?"
Who does a marketing honcho blame?

To get that "right team" in place, the marketing guy pulled an oft-used ploy, yanking a blame-rabbit from his marketing magician's hat. We've seen this trick over and over.

In fact, a loyal reader of this blog shared with us what he believes is the definitive number of such blame-rabbits pulled out of that Miller Lite hat over just the last three decades. Normally we avoid mentioning ad-agency names believing they're inconsequential in our stories, and to avoid stroking already overblown agency egos. But we're about to violate that self-imposed editorial rule. 
Miller Lite ad agencies since 1990
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​That's a new ad-agency team--each announced at the time with much fanfare by MillerCoors--roughly every two years on average​. Now that's a lot of failure right there! A truly astounding string of miscues by some of the most widely respected ad-agency teams around.

Unless the real responsibility for all that failure--the place where the vast majority of all the blame belongs--is somewhere else. Could it be where Miller Lite's ad strategies are approved? Where what's to be said about the beer is identified and championed? Where every ad must be blessed before it runs? Where not a single marketing dollar is spent without a sign-off? Where a marketing honcho's supposed to be sharp enough to demand and approve only the best ads? 
As one of the true advertising giants of the last hundred years so famously put it...
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Or perhaps more to the point for MillerCoors...
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"Look for the craft-beer label!" Sing it, now... or more likely, just ignore it.

7/11/2017

 
It used to be common at the start of focus-group sessions to assure nervous participants "there is no such thing as a bad idea." The aim was to get as many ideas on the table as possible and not allow some potential gem to go unexpressed. Well, as anyone who has ever endured literally hundreds of such group sessions can tell you, there really are bad ideas. Lots of 'em, in fact. So many that it's pretty easy to miss the gem hiding among a barrel-ful of turds.

Back in the late 70's, the labor union representing the (mainly) women engaged in sewing clothes for U.S. manufacturers, reached into that barrel, and absolutely missed the gem... if there even was one in there in the first place. The result was a jingle ad that many over-40 folks can still sing, or at least hum, today.

​Memorable though the ad was, the underlying strategy--get people to seek out only clothing with a union-made label--failed miserably. Indeed, if you were to look for one of those labels today, you'd be hard-pressed to find one anywhere but in a vintage clothes or Salvation Army store. The jobs the union folks wanted to save went overseas. The ad campaign money similarly dried up.
The fundamental misjudgment at the root of this hummable marketing debacle rests with the marketing geniuses who thought they could change long-established consumer shopping behavior. When they shop for clothing, people look for styles, colors, brand names, sizes available, how the item looks on them or makes them feel, the price, the fabric, even the care instructions... all before they'd look for... the union label. See, what the union happened to think was most important--keeping their members' jobs in the U.S and those union dues flowing in--was pretty much least important to clothing buyers.

Seems like a pretty fundamental bit of learning, right? Try to lift some relatively unimportant product feature up to the top of the consideration set, and get ready to fail. And waste your money in the process.

Alas, like ticks, sometimes seemingly dead marketing ideas simply hang around for years waiting for some gullible group to come along... and supply new blood. In this case, it's the craft brewers represented by their dues-supported industry association. This headline sound familiar?
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A flack for that association explains the choice of an upside-down bottle graphic this way: “Craft beer has disrupted the beer market over the last three decades in a way that’s indicative of turning something upside down.” Left unexplained is why the largest word in the seal--independent--is split into three: inde, pen, and dent--making communication in the confines of a tiny seal pretty sketchy. (The image here is roughly twice the size it will appear on beer labels.) More important, what's not explained is why beer drinkers should care.

Maybe the association folks are saving that argument for big-money TV ads with a bunch of bearded brewery types singing about the upside-down-bottle seal. Sure, just ask beer drinkers to choose their beer--not on taste, ingredients, previous experience, brewing process, brewery location, source of hops or water, beer color, alcohol content, local-charitable support--but on a self-serving little industry-association logo.

We haven't seen that ad, but if it exists, something tells us it'll have a jingle.

(Hum along, if you know the tune.)
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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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