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MillerCoors to unveil new cheap-beer push; what they can learn from history

9/21/2016

 
Cheap beer is big business for BigBeer. And with 30% of their volume in "value brands," it's huge for MillerCoors. The problem? This "economy" segment of the market has been trending down for some time now.
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Just a few of the dozens of cheap beer brands
A couple of weeks back, major cheap-beer player, Busch, announced it was changing ad agencies, a move that usually signals a coming change in strategy. Always out to help, we promptly offered our suggestions. This week, two of MillerCoors' cheap beers--Miller High Life and Keystone--followed suit with news they, too, were bringing in new ad agencies. Now word comes from Beer Marketers Insights that tomorrow, MillerCoors will unveil to its distributors a new turnaround strategy for all its cheap beers.

Just in time, and in the spirit of fair play, the least we can do is offer MillerCoors the same sort of
Freely offered and worth every penny help we gave Busch.
The strategic difficulty with cheap beers

​If there was only one cheap beer out there, that brand would be distinctive by virtue of its price. But with virtually identical price points, and no advertising support to communicate anything special, the dozens of cheap beers struggle to register any distinctiveness, the prerequisite to marketing success.

The only modicum of distinctiveness for a low-priced beer these days comes from its brand name and label. Many--Miller High Life, Schlitz and Old Milwaukee, to name three--may retain a faded halo of distinctiveness from their long-gone days as premium brands. But whatever vestige of specialness is still there only diminishes over time as beer drinkers repeatedly encounter the low price. "Cheap" and "premium" are incompatible in beer drinkers' minds. If you're one, you can't be the other.

Others cheap brands--notably Busch and Keystone--have pretty much always been below-premium. Even when "premium" may have appeared on their labels, they were created to compete in the low-price segment, and that's where drinkers put them.

Regardless of how they came to be, brands in both groups offer some valuable lessons.
Cheap-beer history lesson #1
​
What makes one cheap beer different from another? Historically, most beer marketers believed the answer was "not much." Advertising guys--always keen to make ads that get attention, but carry no burden of communicating product facts--often saw cheap, undifferentiated beer as fertile ground for their clever, entertaining ads. "We can make you stand out," they pitched. Their prescription: Over-the-top humor and celebrities. These sorts of ads were widely hailed in the ad community. Hilarious some of them were, but they also failed to move the sales needle, in this case for Old Milwaukee. 
Cheap-beer history lesson #2

Back in the late '80s, Coors decided to broaden its portfolio by launching a low-price beer. (Full disclosure: This author was directly involved in Keytsone marketing during that time.) There hadn't been a new beer launched in the segment for many years. But selling an entirely new brand meant conveying an element of uniqueness. Otherwise, what would be the point of announcing just another cheap beer? On Keystone, the lower price would be a pleasant surprise when a buyer showed up at the beer cooler. The brand would be launched only in cans with a related distinctive-taste claim: bottled beer taste in a can.
Not long into the brand's development, it became clear that the Keystone Light variant held the greatest potential. It was already out-selling the base ("premium") brand by a wide, and growing, margin. To accelerate demand, advertising supporting only Keystone Light was developed... once again featuring a distinctive-taste claim. The claim originated from an obscure notation amid reams of the brewer's product research. But the marketing honcho at the time seized on it for the power of its uniqueness. Among major beers, Keystone Light had the lowest IBU (International Bitterness Unit) level of them all. That made Keystone Light... never-bitter beer. The ads were hilarious, but more important, they registered the brand's distinctive claim.
The greatest volume growth over more than 25 years of the Keystone brand occurred during the course of these two advertising efforts. Neither has been aired for years, and newer advertising--the vast majority making no product-distinctiveness claim--has failed woefully at growing the brand. Hence the search for new ad counsel.

​How we see it

The lesson for MillerCoors today: In one key respect, "value brands" and premium brands are alike: both need distinctiveness to drive consumer choice their way. Entertainment alone is no selling strategy. As the MillerCoors manager in charge of these brands said, “Part of economy is getting back to delivering value.” We agree with her. "Value" means getting something desirable, for less money. Without the "desirable" (distinctive) part, all you have is the "less money" part. And when all the brands are already low-priced, no brand has a competitive edge.

Our advice to MillerCoors is akin to what we told Busch. Find the provocative, appealing product distinctiveness your low-priced brand can offer. Focus your strategy--advertising, packaging, promotion, social media--on that difference.

​And begin winning... again.

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Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man-2: Will lightning strike again?

9/14/2016

 
It's hard to argue with success, even when the success amounts to the rarest of rare events, catching lighting in a bottle.

​On the strength of its "most interesting man" advertising, Heineken's Dos Equis brand has enjoyed roughly 35% growth over the past ten years. As we noted nearly three years ago, the most interesting man achieved that success based on a brilliant strategic decision: Archly associating Dos Equis with the supposedly passé notion of traditional masculinity. Among the brand's over-the-top series of brash, clever, humorous ads, here's one of our favorites...
Back in the day, masculinity was a very common theme in many successful beer ads. But with the arrival of the age of political correctness, it fell out of favor. Celebrating guys-doing-sterotypical-guy-things risked offending lots of easily upset folks, both male and female. Indeed, the once widely accepted notion of "real men" lost its John Wayne underpinnings.  

Just imagine a beer running ads like these today...
A moment of genius

Appreciating that times may change but powerful selling strategies can be timeless, Dos Equis zigged with a strategy anchored in traditional masculinity, just as most brands zagged the other way. Eschewing new-age conventions such as equal roles for guys and girls, gender-neutral outdoor activities, and testosterone-challenged male actors, Dos Equis put a spotlight on the opposite: An über-masculine world-roaming adventurer, a magnet for always-adoring women with whom he appeared successful by each ad's end. Yet, owing to the over-the-top premise and the superbly crafted copy, no howls of offense taken erupted in response. And as we noted earlier, the brand just grew and grew.

​
Now Dos Equis is about to make a critical change in its ads...
The new, just-debuted Dos Equis ads look in many ways like the old ones, but the change is there, too. "We're trying to reach a new audience," explained the brand's marketing honcho. 
This new advertising is no "sure thing."

Even with the same humor and the same writers, could something important be inadvertently lost in the move? Can you change one key element and not change the whole picture? Perhaps beer drinkers will long for the first most interesting man, not the second. Most of all, will the new guy be as good at selling beer as the original? No one--marketing honchos included--can be certain.

A key ingredient missing


In much the same way as other broad, beer-category benefits like "popularity" or "refreshment" or "great partying," pushing "masculinity" aims to associate brand-choice with a psycho-emotional consequence. The best odds of making this sale lie in incorporating a logical but provocative brand fact within a clever, powerful, over-arching creative construct. Without a supporting fact-based component, however, the relatively rare success of such efforts relies exclusively on the many artistic elements--the magic, if you will--of the ad coming together just so. Up until this point, Dos Equis' unexpected approach did just that. But because there really is a touch of magic in ads like this, changing a key element in the artistic construct is risky. There is no fact-built foundation about the beer to fall back on.

Dos Equis might have dramatically reduced that risk. Unlike the latest Heineken ads, the company's sibling Mexican brand never gave folks any interesting statement about the beer itself. Nothing about how it tastes, what's in the recipe, where it's made, who created the beer in the first place. Including any of these bits could have resulted in the most interesting man in the world pushing an especially interesting beer. Selling the beer's distinctiveness makes changing its spokesman a bit less critical, a bit less risky. Absent the interesting spokesman, there'd still have been an interesting beer.

The Dos Equis website certainly offers legitimate facts from which to choose, including the provocative "lager especial" nomenclature...
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Especial... how? Some Dos Equis product facts
We wish Dos Equis well with their replacement salesman. They're gonna need another fortuitous bit of magic to capture lightning in a bottle a second time.

​Too bad they didn't invest a bit more in the magic of their beer.

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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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