Homer Simpson's beer-of-choice was no craft beer with a distinctive name and special brewing recipe. Indeed, Duff was an undistinguished everyman beer, a sort of composite of blue-collar beer brands through the ages. Like Homer himself, ordinary and not-special was its reason for being. Duff ads pretty much applied to--and lampooned--any​ beer back then. Here's an example, awash in the sexism prevalent in beer advertising at the time.

But that was a cartoon, right? Nobody'd seriously market a beer with feature-free generic ads.

​Or would they?

​Not long ago, we hammered craft-beer brands for their flawed attempts at advertising. Many were employing an identical strategy, one that suited any--and every--craft brand. As a result, none of them registered anything distinctive about their craft brand. Generic advertising like that is the stuff of Duff. Selling the entire category is a waste of the advertiser's money, and we noted that craft brewers, without the lottery-like ad budgets of BigBeer, could ill-afford to throw money away.

Now comes Busch beer wasting more money on generic advertising than all the craft beers put together. A lottery loser for sure.

"Our beer is for hard-working men (and a token woman)" may be the least differentiating, most generic of beer-brand strategies. Take a look...

At best, the ad prompts viewers to want a beer... any beer. Not only does the ad's creative notion--saluting hard-working folks working hard--lack distinctiveness, there is absolutely no fact included to convince viewers Busch beer is a particularly good choice for the working class.

Generic it is: Any other BigBeer brand could substitute its cans and bottles and run this ad. But for the different logos, it's as much a Miller High Life or an Old Milwaukee message as it is a Busch message.

Who's responsible for these generic ads?

Generic advertising is the consequence of lazy creative people being lazy. 

In place of thoughtful strategic thinking, the ad guys make empty promises like "We'll look like a leader!" Or, "We can own the target!" Perhaps intimidated, no voice is raised with reasonable responses like, "How is this distinctive?" Or: "Won't we look just like any other brand?" Choosing to proceed without analysis or accountability, insecure clients green-light ineffective generic ads.

Effective advertising, on the other hand--the kind that captures viewer interest and registers a carefully vetted, provocative difference in the beer itself--takes work, intellect, and discipline. Sadly, those are three traits always in desperately short supply among the laziest of ad guys, the Homer Simpsons of marketing.

There are few things some marketers like better than a good buzzword... unless it's two buzzwords.

Take "emotional connection." It's all the rage these days, on the lips of senior marketing people as they explain the brilliance of their efforts.
Just last week, two BigBeer marketing guys were all over it speaking from the podium at an industry conference. Said one:

"... the way you get consumers into your franchise, the way you get new drinkers is that you emotionally connect with them."(Emphasis ours.)

It sounds so... insightful. ​Who can argue with it?

​Read on.

The audience could be excused for mentally responding: "Hey, let's get us some of that emotional-connection stuff!"

Unfortunately, it seems nobody ever directs no-nonsense business questions to the podium. Like: "What exactly do you mean by 'emotional connection?'" Or: "How is it measured so I can correlate it with my market results?"

Mush without measure

The emotional-connection concept did not originate in beer marketing, or in any sort of marketing for that matter. It's sourced in the study of relationships between people. The self-help website life script ("Health with Heart") back in 2008 defined emotional connections as "a bundle of subjective feelings that come together to create a bond between two people." Awww.

But don't subjective-feelings bundles sound a little mushy for business?

That's not the half of it.

More problematic, marketers simply have no accepted way to quantify Dr. Phil-like notions like this. Exactly what emotions make up the connection? (Aristotle listed fourteen emotions; modern relationship websites show nearly ninety!) How do you compare one brand's emotional-connection strength with its competitors? If you can't measure emotional connection, how do you even know you have it? And if it really is un-measureable, how can you ever determine its contribution to your business? Marketers are supposed to know stuff like that, am I right?

A mushy idea you can't quantify may sound like rubbish, but believe it or not, for some marketing honchos, it's absolutely perfect.

Who sells this nonsense? Who buys it?

Pepper your remarks at a conference with "emotional connection for your brand" and you get to sound like a marketing stud, without a worry about even a shred of accountability.

This insightful-sounding-but-not-measureable character also makes buzzwords especially appealing to ad-agency people. Ad guys are  always out to get their client to buy an ad, but they'd rather not have to demonstrate precisely how the ad's going to contribute to business results. It's a risk-reward thing. Selling ads to clients gets ad-agency people a bonus; accountability can get them fired.

So if the advertising types can get their client to embrace a fatuous concept like emotional connection, they win. Believe it or not, we've heard of an ad agency that convinced a particularly gullible client its brand of home water heaters enjoyed an emotional-connection advantage over its competition. According to the story, no wild laughter broke out in response.

Rx: Demand accountability

If you want to see a buzzword concept sputter and fade, simply demand that it be subjected to measurement, and then correlated to in-market results. 

In this particular case, eschew the mushiness of "emotional connection" in favor of the less-hip-sounding "brand loyalty." This proven brand asset can be relatively easily measured, compared across brands, and directly related to a brand's overall business health.

Sadly, immature marketers will always have their own personal emotional-connection problem to contend with: They choose sexy over substance every time.

Paging Dr. Phil.