Before you click the back button and never return to truecask.com for stating such blasphemy, please hear me out. Coors is known for making fizzy yellow beer and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing. Perhaps we should reconsider this assessment, dropping the latter and leaving ‘Coors is known for making fizzy yellow beer’.
I say this because recently Coors has done a couple of really cool things that have caught my eye. These are things that craft brewers should really look into if they want to expand their business:
They found out who the cool kids are, and gave them some cash
Voleurz is a clothing company that all the cool kids wear in the resort town of Whistler BC. It’s still fairly underground due to the fact they have low manufacturing runs, but they are doing interesting things to promote their product. One of these things is a yearly full length action sports video that they put on Vimeo for free. The title sponsor of these free action sports videos? Coors Light. It may not be the biggest project they hitched their wagon too, but I promise you the return on investment they get from the people involved in the video alone is worth it.
They placed controversial & targeted advertising
Truth be told I will hardly ever recommend advertising on billboards to pretty much anyone. The return on investment is so low its painful. That said, with their most recent billboard placed in western Canada Coors has managed to get an amazing amount of buzz. By attacking Toronto in their ads, not only did they connect with the people out west, who at least humorously say they resent Toronto, they pissed off enough people from Toronto to turn it into a discussion. The true take away of this is that controversy, as long as its mildly humorous and not malicious, only brings you more attention.
They are buying ads in places you would not expect them to buy ads
Yardbarker is a site where anyone can blog about sports. Coors has decided that this would be a great place to buy advertisement. Now I’m not a fan of Yardbarker but at the same time this is where the Coors demographic goes to talk all things sports. Its a no brainer that it would be a good, cheap place to get eyeballs. I know Right Brain will be buying a couple silver bullets the next time he’s at the bottle shop.
I’m not saying craft brewers should try to copy Coors. What I am saying is that for craft brewers to expand their market they have to look at marketing from new angles. Its no longer a situation where if you have all the money you have all the eyeballs. With the world of twitter, facebook, blogging, online videos, etc you can only make your brand stronger by getting out there and exploring new options.
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Too bad those folks from Toronto complained. The billboards have all been taken down….
It’s still freaking hilarious though.
Posted by amandab on August 25th, 2009.
My town has been inundated with a glut of Natty Light Billboards and it got me thinking about beer marketing and me as a future (hopefully) brewer. I actually thought about this all day. Quite applicable to read this post now! Anyway, I concluded that I would want MOST of the marketing of my beer to be the result of evangelists; that is, word of mouth. Somebody tastes my product and has to share the news of its splendor with their neighbor, exciting exponential growth.
It has nothing to do with cost savings…just I want the product to speak for itself. Is that arrogant or ignorant? I guess, having grown up “poor” making a lot of money means less than a good pat on the back.
Posted by Nate on August 25th, 2009.
Nate I think there is merit to what you’re saying. Fact of the matter is most breweries have to be based off of evangelists. Its just that these people can only take you so far before you have to attract new people who haven’t heard about you, and then turn them into evangelists who will further your word of mouth.
Nobody is going to win by serving up crap and spending nothing on marketing. The quality of the product is what every craft brewer has to live and die on. It just important to remember that sometimes you have to use everything in your power to get people to know you exist and are making good products. Either that or make crappy beer and spend hundreds of millions of marketing to convince people its fantastic… but who wants to do that?
Posted by cbjerrisgaard on August 25th, 2009.
Wise words: It just important to remember that sometimes you have to use everything in your power to get people to know you exist…
I discovered this with my blog. Agghhh….depressing the first several month of no visitors!
Anyway, marketing does interest me, even though I hate “sales.” you are right…if someone is making crap beer and spending millions to make a few million more, their passion is clearly not beer, but money!
Posted by Nate on August 25th, 2009.