Miller Lets New Craft Brew Speak for Itself – conversational marketing

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — MillerCoors’ new “craft” beer is so small that it can talk to its drinkers individually.

Colorado Native Lager, which launches this week, comes from the No. 2 U.S. brewer’s A.C. Golden Brewing Co. unit, which brews craft-style beers in small quantities and markets them exclusively through digital and word-of-mouth channels. The marketer says the brand is brewed from “99.9%” Colorado-grown ingredients, a percentage that includes the locally made glass bottles. It will be sold only in Colorado, at least at first.

With Colorado Native Lager, A.C. Golden is using the model that worked for MillerCoors’ Blue Moon: seeding the brand through word-of-mouth and letting consumers feel as if they “discovered” the beer for themselves, which encourages them to introduce friends to it. To do so, it’s putting the entirety of its tiny Colorado Native budget into mobile and social-media channels.

Every Colorado Native label is affixed with a “SnapTag,” which, if photographed on a mobile device and e-mailed to a specified phone number, allows the brand to begin a conversation with its drinkers.

After e-mailing in a picture of the logo, a drinker will first get a reply asking for their birthday. If they say they’re older than 21, they’ll be queried with Colorado-centric trivia about their hobbies and interests, and the database will remember the answers and use them to craft future communications and offers to each individual drinker.

What drinkers don’t know …
Those drinkers could be skeptical about any product brewed by a giant, but Blue Moon Belgian White is evidence that macro-brewers can create craft-style beers that can achieve scale. Belgian White, currently the largest craft-style beer in the U.S. with 1,150 barrels shipped in 2009, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights, was introduced by Coors in the mid-1990s without media support, and the company let it pass for a microbrew of sorts. Progress was slow, and it was nearly shuttered around the turn of the century, but the brand eventually gained traction with consumers.

“Most consumers don’t know or care who brews which brand,” said Beer Business Daily Editor Harry Schuhmacher, pointing to Blue Moon and Anheuser-Busch’s Shock Top. “But it is true that the hop-heads and real-beer enthusiasts do care.”

Regardless, small-scale craft brands have continued to grow robustly through the recession despite being priced higher in many cases, a stark contrast to their pricey imported peers, which have been bludgeoned by drinkers trading down to cheaper brands.

By Jeremy Mullman
Published: April 05, 2010

SNAP TAG TECHNOLOGY

• Im just on a bit of a role with looking at beer as vessel for understating the extension of a product consumption… ITS JUST A VESSEL AT THE MOMENT ( BECAUSE IT HAS INTERESTING CONSUMPTION AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS….)
• SNap tag technology is just something I thought worth playing around with as far as creating an easy way to extend the experience into a digital realm.
• Below is the current Snap tag technology, which currently only offers an extended personal experience (THIS SHOULD BE PERSONAL)

DESIGN IDEA 1

• Just a thought for a poster that is for in this example for a Gig, you can take a pix of the poster snap tag and then automatically upload that to information to facebook by asking your mates “anyone going?” or ” Whos keen?”, that conversation instantaneously becomes live and social.

• This is only a really fast proof of concept… The idea is simple enough ( just not seen in our everyday …. YET)

DESIGN IDEA 2

This just davels back into how it could relate to a craft beer.

Im going to explain this as a personal story because I find my self in the target audience and my desire for this is n some way a proof of concept.

1. I am out for a drink with mates from work and I order a beer I haven’t had before – my mates im with don’t drink beer that much so don’t appreciate the conversation I want to have about this beer -my mate Josh would really be interested and I know he would like the beer
   
2. So I take a photo of the snap tag and it automatically sorts a post ready for my social media hub – you can select to specifically target the conversation or make a general “i had this beer statement”
3. I  can from that spot organize with josh THROUGH THIS COMMUNICATION PLATFORM to catch up for a beer…
4. Not only this It then opens me up to other discussions about the beer where I can learn, hear from the brewers, find out what others think and say what i think.
5. That made my personal consumption at a bar social outside of my current physical placement…

THE COLORADO NATIVE SNAP TAG CAMPAIGN ONLY TRIED TO ENGAGE THE CUSTOMER WITH THE BRAND IN A ONE-ONE CONVERSATION….

THIS CAMPAIGN tries to build a socail conversation around the beer and the brand user. the difference is that they are not just opting into conversation they are choosing to participate and lead their own conversations….

Craft Beer . com

Celebrating the Best of American Beer

CraftBeer.com is a Brewers Association website launched in December 2009 that helps to highlight and celebrate our brewery members. This site is poised to quickly become one of the top websites for information on craft brewers and craft beer. Our goal is to have each BA member have a presence on the site through content about their brewery or brewpub, as well as comments coming from the community of craft brewers.

The site is geared toward the beer beginner and the budding beer enthusiast with the hope that hardcore beer geeks also utilize the site. (Read the full press release.)

WHAT IT OFFERS

Contribute Content in These Web Areas

Simple click on the “+Add” link at the top of a post to submit content. Please note that all content is reviewed before being made public.

• Recipes
• Perfect Pairing
• Road Trips
• News
• Events
• Featured Brewery
• Brewery Tours: Send us a YouTube or Vimeo link to your video (5 min. or less in length)

Contribute Comments

Registered users arce invited to comment at the bottom of any post where you see “comments.” It’s free to register. Be sure to view and add your comments to:

• Why Craft Beer: Comments at bottom of the page only. Please state your case!
• Craft Beer Muses Blog

DESIGN PRECEDENT –

Craftbeer.com is a online hub for the whole industry. Its aim is to get people involved in the craft beer genre of beers rather than promote a single brand. It features a few co-created elements and share features such as the “share your road trip”. This is a strong precedent for the demand for such a website, they currently have not extended into facebook or introduced a social transformational element beyond being able to comment.

I am coining that term ‘prosumer’

10:58 am, eh-design – http://majorthoughts.tumblr.com/

Nike+ – Design presedent

Nike+ caters to peoples need for motivation, to run to music and desire to keep track of their runs.

Nike+ is a success in the terms of what I am looking at because it has opened up a direct channel to its consumers.
** It has created a deeply powerful relationship that enhances bothe the product and the service.
** ADnext = this is a “self-perpetrating relationship”, it doesn’t depend on broad brand communications to encourage interest, It gives the consumer a reason to keep re-engaging with the brand.
** the brand becomes as common and second nature as the eftpos card you use.

** although the service is deeply personal and customized It creates a channel for interconnection and belonging through the community platforms, and the ability for sharing information such as running routes, to creating competitions between friends.

### Transformation is about changing the individual, so one may say the social transformation is about changing the individual and his or hers social landscape, how they communicate along with what they communicate and share.

### Nike+ is designed as pine and gilmore state to “guide transformations”, where they where talking about the experience and changing the individual we can see that this applies to the next step as Nike connects a social community, gives them the tools to use the brand as well as the other members to guide transformations.

http://www.chrisheuer.com/

the website of a marketer mentioned in ‘the New Community Rules’ with some interesting insights, particularly his http://www.chrisheuer.com/2009/10/05/the-end-of-marketing-the-return-to-markets/ article

also makes references to the cluetrain manifesto http://www.cluetrain.com/passages.html#longing