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Smirnoff's lazy approach to strategy

8/29/2016

There are two mutually exclusive camps into which marketing strategies fall. Let's call 'em the "2-I's"... innovate or imitate. Innovation offers by far the greater potential rewards, but its risks can be similarly high. Imitation, on the other hand, lures the lazy marketer with the seductive promise of reward with little risk. They reason: If a competitor already innovated strategically, where's the risk for a copycat?

It appears Smirnoff has chosen precisely that second route. And we'd dub it their "2-L approach"... lazy and lame.

Energy drinks are hot... just copy and add alcohol!

See how much all these energy drinks have in common. Brightly colored, non-carbonated, highly flavored liquids in clear bottles.

Energy drinks... mostly

Names include energy-esque descriptors like "force," "electric," and "power." But wait... one of those isn't an energy drink at all! It's the imitative Smirnoff Ice Electric. We admit to hiding the brand name in the group photo above to demonstrate the "kinship" among the products. Anyway, the only innovation from Smirnoff here is dumping alcohol into a vat of energy juice.

When Smirnoff launched their new brand, they were on the receiving end of some amount of criticism of their "boozy energy drink," as Advertising Age called it. Said the Smirnoff flack in response: "It's not a performance drink; it's not a sports drink; its's not an energy drink." She apparently said that with a straight face right before showing the new brand's energy-rich ads. Their non-performance, non-sports, non-energy, non-Gatorade-y, non-Powerade-y tagline? "Keep it Moving."

Imitative product gets imitative ads

Pick your 80 year-old advertising icon: Nothing innovative here.

Who better to demonstrate "keep it moving" to a young audience than an internet celebrity grandma? That'd be a wacky idea, right? And there's really no risk because... Snicker's already plowed that field!

Smirnoff's corporate commitment to imitation

At first we worried we were being too hard and picking on one lame, imitative product from Smirnoff. After all, the company has lots of products. Then we found more imitation. Since we don't routinely screen every booze ad out there, we had missed this one. It seems to indicate, far from being too hard on the booze giant, we were right to wonder whether Smirnoff hadn't elevated imitative marketing to a corporate art. Here the liquor company's trademark vodka mimics Anheuser-Busch's use of comedian, T.J. Miller, brand spokesperson for ShockTop beer.

One wonders if anyone worried about the comedian shilling vodka and beer at the same time.

And will Smirnoff now continue their imitation, follow A-B's lead, and terminate Mr. Miller as the ShockTop people have recently done?

Where will Smirnoff turn next for imitation inspiration?

Wow.

Who knew imitation could be such a tricky strategy?!?

Busch Beer asks for advertising help; we oblige

8/23/2016

Click for full article text.

A mystery solved

Over the past few months, our diligent staff has been trying to solve a little mystery. While we don't collect a lot of data for this site, we couldn't help but notice that we were getting a good deal of folks clicking on an article in our archives, one we had penned over six months back: "Why is Busch beer channeling Homer Simpson?" It lambasted the brand's advertising noting: "'Our beer is for hard-working men (and a token woman)' may be the least differentiating, most generic of beer-brand strategies." Now, it seems those many clicks came from Anheuser-Busch people and ad agency folks involved in yesterday's shakeup announced in the headline article above.

A new ad agency will now try and figure out how to sell Busch beer. This changing-agencies gambit hasn't worked for Bud Light, but perhaps we can help ensure Busch beer doesn't suffer the same sort of failure.

Call us unselfishly helpful.

A novel idea: Begin with a strategy based on distinctiveness

Busch beer competes in the lower-than-premium-priced category. Anheuser-Busch even has a "director of value brands" to look over their many beers that don't command Budweiser pricing. But sadly, the value-brand segment is a very crowded, and largely undifferentiated place. Virtually no brand in this beer-cooler equivalent of a chilly bargain basement has anything distinctive to offer beyond its legacy brand name. Many--Hamm's and Old Style, to name just two--were once vibrant premium brands. Now they've lost advertising support and any distinctiveness they may have once had. Hamm's is just Hamm's... no more ads touting its distinctive land-of-sky-blue-waters home. And no one knows whether Old Style even comes from God's Country anymore.

If Busch beer is to advertise, it needs to uncover a brand insight that delivers real distinctiveness in a provocative fashion. In other words, its ads must actually sell the beer, not merely entertain while hoping in vain anything will result at retail.

Distinctive... and alliterative

So what's distinctive about Busch beer?

Sadly, Busch beer jettisoned its distinctiveness some years back. It lost its one unique descriptor. Concentrating instead on mountain graphics in a me-too effort (never a good idea) to blunt the Coors and Coors Light brands, "Bavarian Beer" disappeared from Busch labels. That happened at about the time the craft beer revolution really picked up steam. Every new craft brand had a story to tell about its distinctive taste, source, ingredients, process... whatever. It is no exaggeration to say the craft beer phenomenon is a triumph of distinctiveness.

So here's the insight: Lower-price-beer drinkers see craft as way too pricey. But what if they could get a taste of a craft-beer style without spending so much? And how would Busch lay claim to that kind of taste experience? By resurrecting its once-distinctive "Bavarian Beer."

Here's how those bits might come together...

"We craft Bavarian Beer for less money." No other brand can make this claim of distinctiveness, and unless we're mistaken, "Bavarian Beer" still echoes favorably in beer drinkers' memories. Of course, craft-beer geeks would whine about the use of that word. Who cares? They aren't the target. The group this direction aims to invite to Busch beer comes from the 80% or so of beer drinkers who aren't craft regulars, and among them, especially the guys who could embrace the idea of craft styles, but never the price.

How an ad agency would try to kill this idea

As we've noted before, ad agencies too often pursue hipness in ads in an effort to enhance their reputations using their client's money. On top of that, agencies want badly to be seen as the source of remarkable inspiration for their assigned brands, so as to protect their position and their profit. It would be unusual, then, for an agency to spark to a notion that didn't emanate from inside its own walls. When an idea like that--however potentially effective--comes to light, ad people normally aim to find a way to kill it.

In this case, we'd expect the agency might disingenuously call the idea "interesting," but want to "research it a bit." Then they'd cleverly assemble a sample of beer drinkers specifically including too many craft drinkers who, as we said, will whine and guffaw at the notion. The (unsurprising) result will be the death of the idea.

On the other hand, smart client beer people will take good ideas from wherever they come, try to beat them, and if they can't, will run with them. They value sales results over hipness by quite a margin.

Let's hope Busch Beer finds real distinctiveness and a provocative strategy... even if it comes from an old beer guy on the internet.

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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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