It's all about the beer.

So a friend of mine is in the process of opening a bar in Dallas. We got into a back and forth on email about advertising, particularly for crappy light beer. I thought you guys might find it somewhat interesting, and frankly, I needed a post and this is written. Score!

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Alright, Jeff – you word whip me, and I’ll word whip you back.

As far as the beer commercials, those generally work best, at least in aggregate (in my opinion), when they mix between certain market positions (taste great, less filling, cold refreshment, whatever) and messages that are more about tacitly saying “we get you” (without saying we get you).

Look at the Bud Light Wassup commercials, or the Bud frog spots– that was bud light’s genius. (Just like one of my favorite nonsense ads ever – the Cadbury Gorilla) – the entirety of the communication isn’t really staking out a functional position, but saying – hey – I'm like you, I like the same stuff you like. Maybe we should hang out every once in awhile? You could throw a lot of Burger King’s King related stuff in that camp, as well.

As far as the cold-activated bottle, flavor protectors, stuff like that – that’s a sign of a company getting past advertising. Generally, when we’re thinking conceptually, we’re looking not just at the content of the advertising, but what sort of stuff can we relate with the audience through, what is the experience of buying/using the product, can we build a new utility into the product that increases the distinctiveness or interestingness?

So you mentioned the CMO of Miller saying the most important attribute of successful beer being (1) taste and (2) refreshment.

I would call bullshit (at least for most people). My list - 1. What do your friends drink, 2. What do your friends drink, and 3. What do you want your friends to think you drink. That may be different if you’re talking to beer connoisseurs, but for the middle market behemoths like Miller, Bud and Coors, I have trouble believing that the difference in taste, or particularly something as ethereal as refreshment, is that great.

If you actually look at most taste tests, what people say they like versus what they actually like turns into one big, mushy gray area. People say they like stuff that they won’t as much if they saw the label. There’s a cool study where they taste-tested wines by only giving the respondent its price. Of course, they’d be given the same wine at $5 and $45. Guess which one most liked better.

Same goes for taste studies on store brand vs. premium brands in supermarkets. People don’t seem to notice taste differences until they’re told the brand. Think of the Pepsi challenge, even if people chose Coke 50% of the time – who cares – you’re at least forcing your customer to ask the question, which is a good thing when you’re not the market leader.

But this is the nature of brands. I saw another study the other day that if our brains were computers, they’d be constantly consuming about 100 million bits of information per second. But you can only actively think about 200-300 bits. So what our brain acts as more than anything else is a filter, and brands or branding is simply taking advantage of that primal nature. Brands are shortcuts, things you trust buying without much consideration.

Now – if you really think about what all these brands are saying, it’s all a series of bullshit platitudes. Coors Light is the most cold? Well how the fuck do you know that? It’s sitting in the same refrigerator as the BL. I put it in my hand on it and they both feel cold. Miller – well fuck, great taste, less filling? Well, BL doesn’t feel MORE filling, does it? And great taste? Says who – that’s about the most subjective thing you could possibly say.

Either way, you do want to help people easily categorize their booze, but what you’re really doing is supplying a research subject with an answer when they say – why do you drink that? – because most people really have no idea. But people like to think of themselves as rational human beings, so they just come up with an answer that seems most plausible. Then they repeat what the advertising said, the researcher tells the agency, the agency says to the CMO – hey it worked! – and the CMO tells the CEO and the CMO gets a bigger paycheck. Woot!

But, in real life, you have to think in terms of functional drivers like taste, selection, stuff like that, emotional benefits like how a brand makes you look, feel and mesh those with the impact of social spaces on how a brand is perceived. Brand nirvana is when you have something compelling to say on all three counts.

So - for your big question – yeah, advertising works for the most part. We’re getting way better at tracking, but in short, you can see that when you advertise, sales go up and when you don’t, sales go down. There are diminishing effects when you do it too much without refreshing your message. But a lot of times, it’s also a game of chicken between multiple companies. Like Coors or BL wouldn’t need to advertise as much in a vacuum, but when you’re getting way outspent, it’s usually (not always) difficult to keep from losing share.

We are seeing an overall lessening of effectiveness in marketing spend, which does explain some of the advertising freakout, but it’s mostly because attention is splintering to lots of different channels with the internet/cable/mobile, etc. – So while people are using a ton more media than they used to, you have to advertise more and in more places to get the same affect as before, with the assumption you use the same tired advertising tactics that most still do.

As a side note, you may want to watch this video from Malcolm Gladwell at TED, it has a similar discussion of taste preferences, mostly around spaghetti sauce, but the same rules apply. Basic takeaway – back in the day, companies would test foods to try and make the perfect sauce, beer, bread, whatever – but at some point in the sixties and seventies – they realized that there is no perfect anything, there’s lots of perfect something – which is why we have a stupidly large selection of toothpaste on the shelf today. Of course, now we’re overdoing it, but that’s a different discussion.