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Interesting people, insightful points of view and incredible stories on what’s popping and not popping in marketing, tech, and culture you can use to win immediately. Brands, Beats and Bytes boldly stands at the intersection of brand, tech and culture. DC and Larry are fascinated with stories and people behind some of the best marketing in the business. No matter how dope your product, if your marketing sucks your company may suck too. #dontsuck
DC: What's happening to Brand Nerds? Back at you with a special edition of Brands, Beats and Bytes, What's Popping and this week, Brand Nerds, we are going to delve into a subject that no doubt you all are familiar with. You've probably conversed about it. It is highly topical with lots of energy around this particular subject. So with that, what's going down, J?
JS: Well, DC LT, um, has found something for us to discuss, and like you said, it's very topical. So let's turn it over to LT.
LT: All right, gentz so, uh, Brand Nerds, uh, as Jay said, we're gonna hit on something that's been a very big news story. And this is the controversy about Bud Light. So I'm sure most of you know this by now, but in case you haven't, Bud Light, put out a special edition can to help celebrate Dylan Mulvey's gender transition. For those that don't know, Dylan is an American actress, comedian, and TikTok personality, and this caused a very fervent reaction from many, most notably Kid Rock who posted a video where he has seen shooting many bottles of Bud Light, along with cursing out Bud Light and Budweiser so, so gentz and Brand Nerds.
What I found interesting, I happen to be in the car listening to Howard Stern a week ago, and Howard said, and this was on his April 10th, uh, Sirius radio show, he said, "I thought there must be a piece of the story that I'm missing. I'm not bothered by gay people or transgender people. They don't impact my life. They don't hurt my life. I love when people are in love. You wanna be a woman, be a woman. You want to be a dude, be a dude. Be whatever you f and want as long as you ain't hurting anybody. I'm on your team." And I think what Howard said, this is me personally, is perfect. I am squarely with Howard on this one. He says this perfectly. Mm-hmm. I don't get why anyone else cares about what anyone else is doing vis-a-vis their sexuality or what gender they are or anything. It doesn't impact me at all. But Jen, that's my view. What I'd like to steer this commentary and our discussion into is to focus on the business side.
Mm-hmm. And specifically how lack of strong brand positioning can impact a major company such as Anheuser-Busch and their parent company InBev, in a way that has potentially dire consequences. But before we get into that business side, gentz, what are your thoughts on the.
JS: Yeah, I, I'll go first. I, I'm with you LT. I agree with what Howard Stern said. I'm, I'm in complete alignment with that. D?
DC: Well, you know, you got some things to, uh, work out when, when you hold up Howard Stern as the, uh, example of, uh, of, uh, uh, humanity, humility, moderations. Yeah, yeah. It my, all of those things, uh, Larry, no disrespect Howard Stern. You, you, you are the goat, you're the goat out here. But, uh, this is a person who has been described by others as the "shock jock." Yep. Okay. So the shock jock is saying he's not shocked. He's not shocked.
LT: And that's why I wanted to use Howard, D, because of that reason. Right?
DC: Yeah. Cause he, he's, he's unmoved by this, but Brand Nerds, there's a saying that I've heard propagated many times, and it is, "it's business, it's not personal." Mm-hmm. I think that's bs. I think business is personal because business is done by people. Yep. So I'm gonna go back to something that happened a long time ago, and the date is April 23rd, 1985. April 23rd, 1985.
Many of you Brand Nerds, were not even born on April by April 23rd.
LT: Most haven't.
DC: Most, most have not. Thank you, Larry. That is the day that new Coke was launched. Mm-hmm. So you, you all Brand Nerds now know something called Coca-Cola Classics. This is their sugar version of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola Classic, but it wasn't always called Coca-Cola Classic. It was just called Coca-Cola. On April 23rd, 1985, they launched a new formula of Coke and they called it New Coke. The reason why they launched this new formula of Coke is. Pepsi, it's arch rival. So you're talking about beers, Larry. So there are beer wars, cola wars were the original marketing wars. Yep. And so Pepsi was coming after, uh, Coca-Cola with the Pepsi Challenge. One of the greatest stunts in marketing history. Yep. And in the Pepsi Challenge Brand Nerds, they went, go check it out. Go, go Google this thing. They would have people tasting cups of Pepsi and Coke and telling the camera which one they preferred.
And sure enough, this is a Pepsi ad. They all picked Pepsi and not Coke. And the reason why they picked Pepsi and not Coke is because at ambient temperatures, meaning room temperature, if you taste something that's sweeter, we as hu as a human species will say that's the better drink. So that's how they did it.
They didn. Them both at, at a temperature that is typically what we use to drink a soft drink or pop is what we used to call it in Detroit. They didn't test it on ice, they didn't compare 'em on ice ambient. So this is like slight of hand marketing. Brilliant. I might ask. I, I, I might add. Brilliant. And so Coca-Cola said we can't have that.
We need to have a better tasting version. So they did new coke, which was sweeter. And you can imagine all the research that was done internally that showed that now if you did this, Test, New Coke would win. If you go to the Coca-Cola website, they have it on their website and it says New Coke. The most memorable marketing blunder ever.
That's on their website right now.
LT: That's on the Coca-Cola website.
DC: Just on the Coca-Cola website. On their company website. Wow. Right. Right now. And then it says, the Coca-Cola company took arguably the biggest risk in consumer goods history announcing it was changing the formula of the world's most popular soft drink and spawning consumer angst, the likes of which no business has ever seen.
That was true Then. And it may still be true now. Mm-hmm. Now I wanna read a quote to, uh, uh, to you all, share a quote by the then CEO, the inimitable Roberto Goizueta. He was the CEO of Coke. We used to affectionately refer to him as "big papa." Here is what he said. But the most significant result of New Coke by far, Mr. Goizueta said was that it sent an incredibly powerful signal. A signal that we really were ready to do whatever was necessary to build value for the owners of our business. Check this out, Brand Nerds. Build value for the owners of our business. Let me go back up to that quote. Business isn't personal. Bus business is not personal, so that's bs. The Coca-Cola company owns the product. They own the product. These products are on the balance sheet, and the Coca-Cola company owns the profit and loss statement, the P&L statement. But the brand, Brand Nerds belongs to the people. Mm. The brand belong to the people. And that is why they made the change, because the people spoke.
Yep. Not only with their voices, but with their, with their pocketbooks and their wallet. They voted and therefore there was a change. Let me connect this to me. You all know that, um, Jeff, Larry and I all worked at the Coca-Cola company and my baby, the brand that I got a chance to steward, spend most of my time on was the Sprite brand. When we repositioned the Sprite brand and it went from, I like the Sprite in you to Obey Your Thirst, which you've heard me talk about in another, uh, one of our podcast, uh, episodes. What's popping, in fact. It was the first time that the Sprite brand had African American young male leads in all of the advertising. That had never happened on Sprite. Never. There was no Twitter back then. Oh. But there was some comments. There were, there were customers who were writing letters to bottlers. The bottlers, so this is, these are the folks that distributed, They cook products and the bottlers would send these letters into the corporate headquarters.
So think of it as snail mail Twitter, and they were letting their dissatisfaction and displeasure known by seeing these young Black men in Sprite ads here. What a couple of the ads said, I mean, couple no letters said one said. We will never buy Coca-Cola products again, any of them, not just Sprite, any of them, because the people in these Sprite ads look like they will more likely be more likely to steal the products than buy them.
Another letter said, we will never buy products from the Coca-Cola company again, because the lips on the people in these Sprite ads look like they could. Over my trailer hitch. Trailer hitch, right. Brand Nerds. Um, that whole campaign and positioning, repositioning to obey your thirst. It could have gotten yanked and dare I say, if, if there were Twitter back then, it may have, but the people spoke and they spoke by buying more and more.
Yep. So because of that, because of that, in part you see hip hop and young Black males and me and hear music done by young, Black and brown males globally to market everything, and it started there. Here's my point, but light comes from an A company that is an American icon. It's not Facebook, it's not Tesla. It's not Apple. No. This is the Coca-Cola company. More than a hundred years have been around and they made that formulation change after 99 years of the same formula and then changed it back to Coca-Cola Classics. 79 days later. Iconic company is Coca-Cola, iconic American company is Budweiser. When you start to deal with changes in there, and we feel you.
The, the president over there at, uh, at, at Budweiser, who is a woman, by the way, I wish I had her name here. Well,
LT: it's the V she's the VP of Mark, the, the president's actually a male, the president, sorry. Anheiser Busch. And let, uh, I also wanna be clear in bed, there's a Belgian company that owns Anheuser Busch, but you Right. D Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser, of course, you know, stalwart America, American Americana brands.
DC: Thank you, Larry. So today, if you look across the marketing landscape, no matter the category, You are going to see evidence of Black and brown people's presence everywhere. But it didn't start that way. So my encouragement to the brand nerds is as the people speak, that's what's popping for me.
LT: Really interesting. Jay, you want to, you wanna hit this?
JS: I, I, I wanna build on an aspect of, of, um, of that, that campaign they launched and that is they didn't seem prepared to respond with any negativity and, and, and you could see that the negativity would come if you understood your brand. Let me explain.
LT: Great point. And Jay, I want to back you, I just wanna back your point. They have not, uh, up until this date, up until yesterday, I haven't checked today. They have not posted in any social media Bud Light since this happened.
DC: Mm,
JS: That's my point. That's my point. You if you understand your brand. This backlash is not out of the blue, right? In, in, in. We, as we, as, as of course you guys know, but we, we teach a concept called knowing your Brand Lover. An example of this, let's use Nike. They're brand lover, is elite athletes, okay? When you look at the Bud Brand Lover, It's not out of question to say, oh, my brand lover would be turned off by this.
Okay. That's the first thing we teach. Another concept called understanding, um, we call the 10 commandments. One of the commandments is, um, thou shall know their brand boundaries. Okay? And this is stretching their brand boundaries. It's not saying they shouldn't have done. What I'm saying is they should have been prepared for a response.
Mm-hmm. April 1st, I believe, and you know, I'm gonna date the podcast. This is now April 20th and there hasn't been a response. My only thing is I wish they would've had a response prepared to better back their campaign. So I completely agree with the campaign. It's just I wish they would've, would've had a, um, would've been prepared to respond to it because to date they have not,
LT: well, well, they, uh, I'm gonna correct you.
One, they haven't responded socially. They actually put out an ad. That was much more Anheuser-Busch corporate. You know, we're, we're an Americana brand. They, they pulled out the Clydesdales again. God, you know, they have that, um, incredible icon. And again, that's a, the Budweiser brand. Remember, there's Budweiser and Bud Light.
So I love this contr, this conversation, Jens. That's where I'm gonna build off of what you just said, Jay, if that's okay. So, and, and,
JS: and, and, and last thing, they, they did say this and I, and I like, and I like to read this. Yep. Um, we never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. Yep. In the business of bringing people together over beer.
LT: Okay. And that was, that was a press release, by the way. By the c e o. Yeah. By a press
JS: release, by the c e o. Um, and so they, they, they did say that, but they seemed unprepared for, for what they could have been prepared for. That's, that's my only thing.
LT: That's, it's a great point, Jeff. Um, so I'm gonna build on what you said.
So, you know, beer, beer sales are tough to get, uh, if you're not, if you're not, not subscribed to Nielsen or iri. Which are the syndicated, uh, retail sales, uh, that, uh, tho those companies, uh, provide. So, but from what we can discern, bud Light is clearly the number one brand in the US followed by Coors Light and Miller Light. And though both of those brand and brands are a good distance behind in num in second and third place, but by the way, they're all showing brand, uh, declines. So here's. Here are my thoughts. The metadata would suggest that the major consumption was and still is in light beer. And Bud Light drafted their success off of the Budweiser brand.
The Mother brand, which is based in Americana, as we just alluded to, and for a long time, was the number one beer in the country for its brand positioning for Bud Light's brand positioning. They took an offbeat, humor based pivot off of that mother brand of Bud. We. And at the same time, in my humble opinion, Bud Light never really positioned their brand in a way that truly emotionally connected with consumers.
I think people said, ah, it's funny, and it's Bud Light, right? So as beer sales decline as a category, Bud Light has struggled to find a brand positioning that genuinely emotionally connects with consumers. So they keep going back to humor to try and make it happen. They had a couple of cute ads with Miles Teller and his wife recently on the Super Bowl.
Cute ad, dare I say, if you saw this ad and uh, two minutes later somebody asked you what the ad was for, I doubt most people would even say it was for Bud Light. So the problem is, Who is Bud? Bud Light's Brand lover. That's what Jeff said. And again, brand nerds. We hold up the, the Brand Lover as somebody who would be the delegate to the convention for Powerade. We, our team did a great job. Our brand lover was the captain of the football, baseball, and basketball team in high school. So it wasn't just young athletes that was our Brand Lover. So, dare I say, I don't think Bud Light knows who their Brand lover. And how are they positioning the brand against the Brand Lover if there isn't one? I, I just don't see that. So with all the success they have had as the number one brand, they are not emotionally connected with consumers in my opinion. And since they don't have a fervent group, they are emo that are, are emotionally connected to Bud Light when this happens. There are no consumers who love Bud Light so much to get their back.
D, you alluded to Coca-Cola when that happened. People really raised their hands and said, I want my Coca-Cola back. Mm-hmm. There were fervent Coca-Cola users to get their back. I'm gonna use Nike and Colin Kaepernick. That situation, when that happened, there were so many people, again, I might add some of the same people that were shooting up. Bud Lights we're burning Nike. But there were so many fervent consumers who were emotionally connected to Nike that they got their back. So when this happened, Nike was so emotionally connected to, to those folks. Those people rose up and defended, and I'm gonna put an air quotes their brand. Because Bud Light doesn't have a strong brand positioning. No one is doing that for Bud Light. And this is the consequence of even a big selling brand, not having a strong brand positioning and how we could severely impact a whole company and their future. Thoughts?
DC: I don't have much more to add. Uh, lt, your Nike example is a great one. Um, and I'm going to place that against Jeff's point of not being prepared. Yes. Uh, in the case of, in the case of Budweiser and Bud Light, not only was Nike prepared for the backlash, they were prepared to say, if you've got an issue with what we're doing with Colin Kaepernick, bye-bye. Yeah, that's right. See, see, see you later. We would like you not to buy any more of our stuff. Yep. Yeah, if, if you, if you want to boycott, then you can do that, that's fine.
But you can only do that if you already know that those that are boycotting, that sales growth is going to be replaced and incrementally, uh, built upon by another constituents. So this, this is one where, uh, uh, a as smart as, as our profession is, sometimes we can prematurely, uh, with good intentions Yeah. Place ourselves unwittingly in very, very hot beer.
LT: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and to summarize strong brand positioning, right? Mm-hmm. You know who your consumer is, and as, as Dee you just alluded to, they prune. Tho those consumers out emotionally connected even more to their, to the base. Mm-hmm. And to Jeff's point, because they knew all that.
They were not only, they were incredibly prepared in every way.
DC: Nike, you mean every way Nike. Yes. Nike. Yep. Yep. Agreed. Yep. Nike, I, I, I, I agree. And, and I, I'll say this, is that, um, let's go back to Sprite. They weren't using words like diversity and inclusive back when this was going down. Yep. But here's what we knew from a consumption perspective.
We knew that Black and brown people were over indexing in the consumption of spread. Mm-hmm. And we, we made a calculated bet that if we found a way to appeal to those folks, specifically our brand, Which was someone who had the ability to trust their instincts. Um, and that typically meant someone, um, who others consider to be, um, like universally cool.
And there's some science behind that, which I won't get into now. Uh, we thought, yeah, we can weather this storm because we got the numbers that back up. Why, why we're doing this. Gotta be careful when you're saying I just need to expand the circle and be more inclusive if you don't have a surgical understanding of what you're adding to what you're adding to
LT: D, I'm so glad you said that because. What I was saying was sort of underneath, I didn't say it specifically, but I'm glad you called that out. Mm-hmm. Because that's what you, that's what we're all discerning. Yep. That, and that's what Jeff was alluding to. Very in, in a great way that they weren't prepared because they didn't understand all that.
And going back to your Sprite example, not only did you know you had the facts to back it up. That you've talked about in the previous, um, what's popping podcast about that specifically about Black and brown folks who were, and young folks who were gonna, who were, who were already into the Sprite brand.
But you also knew that hip hop music was Yes, emotionally connected to African American. But what were the record sales, even in, in those days, like 70% were, uh, were uh, white kids who were buying it. So you also knew that African American youth were purveyors of the culture at large and that if you emotionally connected with them, it was also going to have, uh, a a lot of great impact for you with the whole market, which in fact it did. It sure did.
DC: Absolutely. LT it is one additional point. There were no terms like influencer back then either. Right? Right. But we, we had a high degree of confidence that the, the people that we were representing in our marketing, which were mostly Black and brown, uh, young folks, that the white kids were in fact influenced by these kids by virtue of their consumption of the music.
So we knew that they, some of these young white kids were like looking at some of these, uh, MCs rapper. As heroes. Yep. I wanna be like that.
LT: And also like that you connected it with basketball too. So you had the, the, the two principle cultural phenomenon. Yes. Yes. Covered in a huge way. And they were inter, inter interconnected and you did an incredible job of interconnecting them.
So, so that had an exponential growth sense with not only, uh, the, the, what we would call the bullseye target, but also the, uh, the entire target audience at large.
JS: Yeah. So, um, I I, I do wanna share, um, an investor takeaway that I read, and I'm gonna read it verbatim and it says this, which is good news for Bud Light. Uh, social media boycotts have become all too common, nowaday. But nearly every single one has been all bark and no bite. This one will be no different. The largest brewery in the world in international behemoth won't be derailed by a few outraged talking heads on the internet. Hmm. We shall see
LT: Since Jeff. I agree with that, but. You can feel, cuz we've been, you could feel the scramble going on. Yes. And Anheuser Busch, and it goes back to they don't know the brand positioning of Bud Light. They don't understand it. And so, and they're not prepared. So brand nerds, what we're trying to say is, if you don't have a strong brand position, even with a mul, like a billion dollar brand, it could have a, a huge adverse impact on, on your business and on your life versus what we talked about with D's team at Sprite, which we know he, you're, you're looking at the epicenter D and his team, but also the way Nike handled it, not the.
JS: It's, it's not the same because, you know, their response was to show a mainstream ad versus, versus, um, digging a little deeper on, on what they, um, what, what they originally showed. So, right, completely.
DC: There's an, there's an old ad adage, pun intended, that goes like this, Brand Nerds, this is way back in the day.
I heard this for the first time. "Nothing kills a bad product, like great advertising." That's right. Nothing kills a bad product, like great advertising.
JS: That's right.
DC: In, in modern day parlance, I would say nothing kills a brand campaign, a bad brand campaign. Um, uh, more than having a whole bunch of money to do it. Okay? Right. Whole bunch of money and this. I'm not making this comment Brand Nerds about inclusivity. I'm down with that. Yep. I'm, I'm, this is a point about Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we are, we are down with that. This is a point about, um, strategic. Yep. This is a point about strategy. That's it. And execution. And execution.
LT: I think that's a great last word. We, uh, should we rock the end?
JS: Let's, let's do it.
LT: Okay, Thanks for listening to the Brands, Beats and Bytes recorded virtually on zoom and a production of KZSU Stanford, 90.1 FM radio worldwide at kzsu.org. The executive producers are Jeff Shirley, Darryl "DC" Cobbin, myself, Larry Taman, Joseph Anderson, Jade Tate, Hailey Cobbin, and Tom Dioro.
DC: The Podfather.
LT: And if you are listening to us via podcast, it would be great if you can please rate and review us. Additionally, if you do like the show, please subscribe and share. We hope you enjoyed this podcast. And we look forward to next time where we will have more insightful and enlightening talk about marketing with another great business leader as our guest.