"Look for the craft-beer label!" Sing it, now... or more likely, just ignore it.

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?

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.

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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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