Big Brands Big Trouble by Jack Trout

Author:Jack Trout [Trout, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mobilism
Publisher: Westland
Published: 2015-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter

10

Miller Brewing

A “Miller” Too Far

If number one ranked Anheuser-Busch had been able to pick a number two competitor, they couldn’t have done much better than to pick the Miller Brewing Company, which didn’t stand a chance. The numbers tell the story.

In 1970, Anheuser-Busch sat on top of the brewing world. They shipped 22,201,811 barrels of beer while the number two, Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company brewed 15,129,000 barrels. About that time, Philip Morris acquired Miller and added a lot of marketing muscle.

Marlboro Meets Miller

A May 1976 Forbes article summed up the situation:

Miller was a sickly company run by an aging management group when Philip Morris acquired it from W. R. Grace in 1969. Its High Life beer was one of the three truly national premium priced brands, along with Budweiser and Schlitz, yet several regional brewers outsold it in the U.S. market.

Philip Morris’s purchasing of Miller, as it turned out, proved the final key to Miller’s meteoric rise both as a brand and as a brewery. Philip Morris president George Weissmann waited until late 1971 before installing his own management team of tobacco executives at Miller. Most beer executives and industry experts were unprepared for the full-scale assault Miller was poised to launch to quickly overcome competitors and become a dominant player in the market.

To this end, Weissmann’s new team made a conscious decision to employ the same marketing techniques that had spurred the Marlboro Man to fame during the 1960s. For Miller High Life, a venerable but underperforming brand, the problem was one of poor positioning. Their campaign was a model of refinement featuring jazz trumpeter Al Hirt. “Sold for years as the champagne of beers, High Life was,” according to a November 8, 1976, Business Week article, “attracting a disproportionate share of women and upper-income consumers who were not big beer drinkers.… A lot of people drank the beer, but none drank it in quantity.”

The solution seemed as simple as selling cigarettes to the heavy cigarette user through a strong brand association. Instead of being held back by the champagne crowd, High Life would now be targeted at blue-collar workers, younger drinkers, and males in general, who together made up the bulk of beer drinkers measured in terms of consumption (Joe six-pack was the target). Advertisements for High Life began featuring young people riding in dune buggies and oil drillers sipping on a cool one after squelching an oil blowout.

Simple yet effective, “Now Comes Miller Time” carried the High Life brand through an enormously profitable decade. In 1975, Miller Brewing posted sales of $658 million and became the fourth-highest beer seller in the country. Two years later, Miller High Life over took Schlitz’s number two position on the charts. With the financial clout and marketing savvy of Philip Morris backing it, the Miller brand name had by this time truly come into its own.

Let There Be Lite

By 1980, Miller was the second largest brewer in the United States. Anheuser-Busch was on top with 50 million barrels, but Miller had climbed into a strong second place with 37,300,000 barrels sold.

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