Sam Adams is crowdsourcing a limited edition beer. It’s bad marketing and even dumber business strategy.
It evidences standard practice for social promotions these days, though, so I’m sure the company will get industry praise for it. It's based on two of the core tenets of social marketing, in that 1) digital media have empowered consumers to know and do pretty much everything, and 2) consumers want to have ongoing conversations with brands.
Both premises are false, and the Sam Adams beer promo is a good example of why.
First, most people will never know most things let alone be expert at more than a few things about anything in particular. Access to the world wide web is immensely empowering and informative but I think we marketers have grossly overstated the qualities of knowledge or skill that might come with that access. Patients can certainly research medical information but they can’t necessarily (or reliably) vet the useful from the inane, and their conclusions shouldn’t replace those of a doctors. Same goes for the law or accounting, not to mention designing cars or rocket ships. Or beer.
There might be one out of a hundred (or fewer) Sam Adams customers who know enough about beer to actually propose its ingredients, but the overwhelmingly vast number of consumers are expert only in drinking it.
So the company will end up with a good beer that involved a minuscule number of its customers, at best, or an undrinkable swill, at worst and most likely.
This crowdsourcing thing is also bad news for the brand overall. Isn’t Sam Adams supposed to know how to make beer? Strip away all of the emotional and other associative benefits that brand experts see the company attaching to its brand and aren’t you left with, well, ingredients, brewing expertise, and distribution? Forget what the brand stands for and consider what it stands upon.
The company’s marketers are happy to throw away this once rock-solid platform in exchange for the glib, throw-away benefits of telling the world that a collection of strangers can do it as well or better.
I just don’t get it.
Well, I do get it when I consider the bill of goods that brands have been sold when it comes to social engagement: The pitch is that consumers want to talk to brands (and tell them what to do, more than occasionally), so brands have to come up with ongoing ways to do so. Brands have voices that are now translatable into actual images and words positioned on social technology platforms as prompts or responses to the images and words posted by consumers. Conversations are the replacement for one-way advertising and other marketing tools that used to tell consumers things...that they then went about talking and having conversations about thereafter (in-person, on the phone, and any other way people used to converse before Facebook and Twitter claimed to own the idea).
By focusing on the mechanism of conversation and not its substance, brands are missing the real truth and power of peer-to-peer technology.
Since consumers always had conversations -- and always used them as the basis for gaining, vetting, and then making their purchase decisions -- the availability of real-time and ubiquitous information is a change, for sure, but it doesn’t change the nature of conversation itself. People talk to other people. Always did, always will.. So when brands come up with ways to pretend that brands can talk too, like just other consumers with particular opinions or points of view, they’re actually they’re actually choosing to provide less meaningful content into those conversations.
You see, people talk about brands, not with them.
So every tidbit of nonsense the social media marketers create to occupy space in conversations fills a space that could have been filled by something useful, meaningful, relevant, or -- gasp -- related to making a sale. When Sam Adams chooses to talk to consumers as if it were just another participant in the conversation, it loses the opportunity to insert something into the conversation that might actually benefit the participants.
Brands don’t have voices as much as consumer voice their feelings and opinions about brands.
Here’s a simple test to consider if you don’t agree: imagine if Sam Adams didn’t conduct its beer-making social campaign. Would anybody miss it? I hate to get all utilitarian on you but if brands can’t think of something meaningful to say to consumers, why should they say anything at all?
Sam Adams should stick to expertly making great brews that it sells to consumers expertly. As for this campaign and the beer it’ll create, all I can say is:
Yuck.
(Image credit: the patriotic brewer)
