Ad Age unleashed a flood of comments with its recent piece on how consultants managed to tank the Bud Light brand by pushing "drinkability" as the new strategic positioning for the brew. As of today, the article had generated 47 comments. By Ad Age commenting standards, that is pretty much of a deluge.

Why the passionate outpouring of commentary on one story? I suspect the main reason is the fact that the article discusses a real sore spot for ad industry types: Marketers’ increasing use of consultants to develop and even implement marketing strategies and programs. Ad agencies have long felt that consultants were breaking their rice bowl. To a degree they are right to be worried.

In many cases, the advertising industry brought the problem on to itself by abdicating its long term strategic planning role for clients.

In the Ad Age piece, Anheuser-Busch apparently hired a consulting firm called the Cambridge Group to help them figure out their expanding brand portfolio. That is actually not a bad project for a good consultant to work on, but Cambridge ultimately came up with a Bud Light positioning ("drinkability"), which had the exact opposite effect on the brand’s growth as was obviously intended.

The positioning sank the brand. I certainly was not surprised. "Drinkability" is a lame positioning for a leading light beer brand like Bud Light (more on that later).

As I commented on the Ad Age story, the first mistake by AB and its agencies (and consulting firm) was to confuse a strategic positioning (the aforementioned "drinkability" concept) with a creative idea. They are not one in the same. When you conflate the two, you are definitely tempting marketing disaster.

But that is exactly what Bud and its agencies did. They took the "drinkability" strategy from Cambridge (which, in my view, was an extremely undifferentiated positioning for Bud Light), and literally made the term the centerpiece of their advertising for the brand.

Don’t know about you, but when I first saw the "drinkability" spots, I thought, "now that is pretty stupid…running a brand positioning as your ad creative." I almost thought it was a joke. No wonder the campaign failed miserably. As Ad Age noted, a "debacle" for Bud Light.

AB is now scrambling to figure out how to regain the lost market share for its once market leading brand Bud Light. Next time, when they are green-lighting a strategy and campaign, they will think twice about confusing a strategic positioning with a creative strategy.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS