Even if you make an awesome product, if you don’t help your perfect customer identify with your brand, it won’t sell.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom-and-pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients, so here’s one of those.

[Tapper’s Jewelry Ad]

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here, along with Stephen Semple, and we talk about brands, building big brands, big, exciting, profitable brands, and yet, during the countdown, Stephen didn’t mention which brand we’re going to be talking about, but he did mention a category. Somebody built an empire so big that their product actually created the category of light beer.

Stephen Semple:

Yes, and the reason why I have to look at it that way is it’s a big company that made it happen, but it’s still a pretty interesting story, because light beer, look, it’s a huge category in the beer business, and it was not always that way. In fact, when light beer was first launched, it was a huge failure. It bombed, and it was Miller that created the first success in this space and really created this as a category. At its peak in 1977, Miller Lite was the number two beer in America.

Dave Young:

We’ve talked about Miller Lite and their campaign, and they had the world by the tail with Miller Lite.

Stephen Semple:

They really did, yeah.

Dave Young:

Then somebody talked him into changing the campaign.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Yep.

Dave Young:

Because it was at their peak, when it was the Less Filling, Tastes Great.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. That’s what made it, and we’re going to talk about how that came about, because it’s a really interesting story. Because calorie-reduced beer was introduced in the market in New York by Rheingold Brewery as Gablister’s Diet Beer.

Dave Young:

Yum.

Stephen Semple:

Sorry. Gablinger’s Diet. It was introduced as a diet beer, and it was made using a process developed by chemist Herscher Gablinger of Basel, Switzerland, so it’s this Swiss chemist created the process. The version used by Rheingold was developed by Joseph Owades. Now, Joseph then offered the recipe to Peter Hand Brewery, which created Meister Brau Light, so the second one that came out was Meister Brau Light. Now Peter Hand Brewery got into financial trouble in 1972 and sold several of their labels to Miller, and Miller relaunched the light beer as Lite Beer from Miller, not Miller Lite at first, it was Lite Beer from Miller, and Lite being L-I-T-E. It didn’t do well. In fact, it was a dud. Around the same time, another brewery was struggling with a light calorie-reduced beer, and the category was simply not working. The problem was the ads were aimed at dieters.

Dave Young:

This was the era of Tab soft drink. There were diet things. Everything was diet, diet. My guess is they steered the diet industry in a different direction.

Stephen Semple:

The whole diet thing, just for the beer category, didn’t work, but here’s when things get strange. When they were doing market research on it, because Miller really believed there was an opportunity here, and when they did market research on it, it showed that 90% of Miller drinkers had tried the light beer once, they had tried it. They didn’t say they disliked it, but they didn’t buy it again. On one hand, you can go, “Well, the advertising’s working, the promotion’s working, our drinkers are trying it. They’re not saying they dislike it, but they’re not buying it again.” Here’s basically where they landed. The Miller beer drinker at that time was really described as the two-fisted drinker, and they had no interest in dieting, so it was about self-identification. They would try it, they would go, “This is okay, but I’m not a dieter,” all about self-identification, other than in this one little town of Anderson, Indiana.

Dave Young:

Oh, really?

Stephen Semple:

Because when they did research, what they found was in Anderson, Indiana, Miller Lite was actually selling really well. Miller hired the ad agency, McCann Erickson, to create a new advertising campaign, and they hopped in the car and they drove to Anderson, Indiana, and here’s what they discovered. Here’s why it was doing well. Anderson Indiana was a steel town. The steel workers liked it, because they felt less bloated, and they could drink more.

Dave Young:

Heck, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Key insight. Bury the local story in the idea of less filling. Everything you always wanted in a beer, but less. Then how do you make it entertaining? They played around with jingles. The jingles did not work. Then they had the idea of, “Well, what if we have people arguing back and forth? Tastes great. No, less filling.”

Dave Young:

Less filling, yeah. The hilarious part of the argument is that they’re both arguing the good features of the beer.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. It is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant campaign. Then next, they tied it to retired sports celebs, especially tough guys, because this idea of low-cal was seen as being feminine. Well, if all of a sudden, you have a retired tough-guy football player arguing with another retired tough athlete, that idea disappears.

Dave Young:

Yes.

Stephen Semple:

So it was a brilliant, brilliant campaign, and it features some of the greatest names in sports. One of my favorite ones, and we’ll include the clip in it here, one of my favorite ones is the one with George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin. For those who don’t know, George Steinbrenner was the owner of the New York Yankees. Billy Martin was the general manager, and this was during the time when the Yankees, well, the Yankees have always dominated baseball, but they were really doing great. George Steinbrenner kept getting pissed off at Billy Martin, and he kept firing him and then rehiring him. Of course, this ad completely plays on that whole theme of Steinbrenner firing Billy Martin, and it’s a hilarious ad.

George Steinbrenner:

A lot of people think Billy and I argue all the time. Actually, we agree on just about everything. Right, Bill?

Billy Martin:

You betcha, George.

George Steinbrenner:

We even drink the same beer.

Billy Martin:

Lite Beer from Miller’s. Lite’s got a third less calories than the regular beer, and it’s less filling.

George Steinbrenner:

The best thing is it tastes so great.

Billy Martin:

No, George. The best thing is less filling.

George Steinbrenner:

No, Bill. It tastes great.

Billy Martin:

Less filling, George.

George Steinbrenner:

Billy, it tastes great.

Billy Martin:

Less filling, George.

George Steinbrenner:

Billy?

Billy Martin:

Yeah, George.

George Steinbrenner:

You’re fired.

Billy Martin:

Oh, not again.

Speaker 8:

Lite Beer from Miller, everything you always wanted in a beer and less.

Stephen Semple:

But there were so many of them, and they all had the same thing. “Tastes great.” “No, less filling.” “No, tastes great.” That argument. Look, that campaign went on to be rated one of the top 10 campaigns of the 20th century. Look how well we remembered. It stopped in 1990.

Dave Young:

Oh, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

19 freaking 90. It hasn’t been on in decades, and we still remember it.

Dave Young:

What happened to their market share after they stopped it?

Stephen Semple:

When Miller started this campaign, their early production, they basically doubled in really quick order. They quickly went from 12 million barrels to 24 million barrels. They went up quite dramatically. Now, what I’ve not looked up what their share is today, but when you take a look at the top three or four beers, they’re Budweiser beers. Now, here’s the interesting thing. Bud has stumbled a little bit, bud Light has stumbled a little bit, and Miller has rerun that ad a couple of times. They freshened it up, and they’ve rerun that ad a few times in the last little while, which I find quite interesting. But you’re right, they had a great campaign, and they changed it.

Dave Young:

They get a big idea, and they let somebody convince them that it’s not working, somehow. Somebody had to tell them that, “Oh, it’s just gone stale.” It’s like, “No. It’s just got woven into the fabric of society.”

Stephen Semple:

I think that the challenge that you can have happen is the advertiser will always become more tired of the campaign than the consumer, because you hear it so many more times, right? You’re living it, you’re breathing it, you’re creating it, you’re producing it, you’re double checking it, you’re approving it. It’s like how I feel about our podcast. By the time it’s published, I’ve heard it so many times, I’m actually tired of it.

Dave Young:

Sure, but you’re not the listener.

Stephen Semple:

But I’m not the listener. That’s exactly it.

Dave Young:

The other weird dynamic, just from the advertising world, from our glimpse into it, is you’ve got a campaign that’s been running for what, at that point, close to 20 years, 15 years?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. 1975 to 1990.

Dave Young:

All the awards for that campaign have been given.

Stephen Semple:

True. You’re not going to get any more.

Dave Young:

If you’re a young person coming into advertising, you’re not going to be viewed as somebody creative for shepherding that campaign for another 10 years. Right? The pressure from creative types, and then this weird sense of burnout from the brand itself, from the owners themselves, because they’re not the general public, almost always leads to a campaign that gets its teeth kicked in eventually, because that’s just where the pressure is taking it. The public is still along for the ride.

Stephen Semple:

I even had this idea happen, Dave, with a client of mine where we created this, it was a campaign within a campaign, because it’s literally two ads a year as part of a radio campaign. It was this story about, so it was a jeweler client of ours, and it’s a story of his dad selling the car to start the business, and then there’s the hunt for the car. Well, when we first did it, the customer was like, “Okay, great.” They wanted to wrap it up in the first year. I said, “No. We’ve now been riding this campaign three-and-a-half years, and we’ve got another year in it.” Every year, they’re like, “Well, aren’t people tired of it yet?” “You are tired of it, because the car’s sitting in your garage, because you bought it, but the consumer is not at all tired of it, and every time we run it, we get this big lift and response rate.” But I get it. We get tired of it far more quickly than the consumer does.

I’m really proud of that campaign. Actually, Dean Rotbart published a book, All You Can Eat Business Advice. There’s a chapter in that book that actually talks about this campaign. Check that out on Amazon. It’s cool. Roy Williams got a chapter, there’s a chapter focusing on him, Ryan Dyess, a bunch of others, but that campaign in particular got covered in the book. My point on it is they were prepared to end it far sooner. What I knew is we could actually ride this way longer and make it richer and deeper and actually more impactful.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

[Empire Builders Ad]

Dave Young:

Let’s pick up our story where we left off, and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

Stephen Semple:

There’s a couple of lessons from the whole Miller Lite side, and Dave, as always, you took it in a direction I wasn’t anticipating, which is the whole idea of them abandoning the campaign. But what’s interesting is both the success of the campaign and the early failures in the light beer space all boiled down the self-identification, how we see ourselves.

Dave Young:

Yeah. It’s understanding the consumer and why they’re buying your brand.

Stephen Semple:

They buy it because it’s got to fit how they see themselves, and I think that is often underestimated, the power of that, and not enough advertisers understand that a big part of consumer behavior is about how they see themselves and how your product fits into that self-identification. Look, you can’t change how the consumer sees themselves. They’re going to see themselves the way they want to see themselves.

Dave Young:

As we said at the very beginning, it kicked the door open on a whole new category of beer.

Stephen Semple:

Yes, it did.

Dave Young:

Right? You wouldn’t have the Coors Silver Bullet or the Bud Light. That was the frogs, wasn’t it?

Stephen Semple:

What’s up?

Dave Young:

There’s so many good, “What’s up?” So many great light beer-as-a-category ad campaigns because Miller created this category.

Stephen Semple:

Here’s the thing I thought that was brilliant about what they did. We’ve talked a few times now about strategy, and we often talk about an unleveraged asset, and this is an example of an unleveraged asset. The unleveraged asset was that beer was selling really well in this one place. Why is that? Look, when things like that happen, often companies will make stuff up. “Well, it’s this and it’s this and it’s this,” and they went to that place and observed those purchasers and had conversations with those purchasers and found out why. All of a sudden, there’s this unleveraged asset, so you got the problem, unleveraged asset that led to, “Okay, this is about it being less filling, not being diet.”

Dave Young:

If you could, and this would be impossible to do, but in that town, I’ll bet you that there were a few early adopters that sort of discovered that it was less filling for them, didn’t feel as bloated, that were popular guys, that were people that others respected, respected their opinions, and they’re like, “Well, if Steve tried this beer and says it doesn’t bloat him up as much, maybe I’ll have one.”

Stephen Semple:

Right, right.

Dave Young:

Right? There’s always those early, early adopters that get everybody else on board, and then you can go kind of figure out the reason, but somebody had to stop and figure that out. It had to have been a handful of people that accidentally bought a case of Miller Lite for after work and discovered that they just weren’t as bloaty after they got home.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure that’s absolutely it. But what I found so fascinating about this was that self-identification piece, moving it away from being diet to less filling, and how this whole thing was discovered through this unleveraged asset of this one little steel town that the product was selling well. I thought it was an amazing and brilliant story. For anybody who does not remember the campaigns, go on YouTube, type in “taste great, less filling commercials.” There’s a whole bunch of them, and they are just absolutely, absolutely awesome.

Dave Young:

They were always fun to watch.

Stephen Semple:

They really, really were. They really were great.

Dave Young:

All right. Well cool. Thanks for bringing me a Miller Lite this morning.

Stephen Semple:

There you are. Well, I don’t want you to go through the day bloated there, Dave.

Dave Young:

Yeah, that’s good breakfast beer, I think. Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

There you go. All right. Bye.

Dave Young:

Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. If you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.