In an age of weak beer and no hair, Molson Canadian 67 embraces the New Normal

Jerry, man...

Advertising whiz Jerry Della Femina, who not only lived but epitomized the high life depicted in the TV series “Mad Men,” once tried to sell light beer and couldn’t.

He writes in his entertaining 1971 bestseller, “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor,” how his brilliant campaign for Gablinger’s Diet Beer, a product of Rheingold Breweries, failed to persuade suds-lovers to switch brands in order to cut calories.

Forced to explain how his judgment could have been so wrong, the ad maven whines that he didn’t initially understand how beer-drinkers — being some sort of primitive blue-collared species — actually took pride in their distended guts, and considered the word “Diet” as anathema.

Others would simply say that both the product and its ad support missed the mark by miles.

Gablinger’s happened along, way back in 1967. A decade would pass before Miller Lite and Natural Light from Anheuser-Busch would emerge to create a sector category. Today three of the four leading beer brands are “light,” as are six of the top 10. That would make these diluted brews the new normal. And that, in turn, would force some brewing industry executive to spur the introduction of an Extreme Light as the new, um, light.

Beer at its most ephemeral

Hence, Molson Canadian 67: a beer so light, that, as the joke might go, you hardly need bother. As much as I’d like to think that the “67″ name is there to honor the year of both the birth of Gablinger`s and the Canadian centennial, it actually refers to the number of calories in a 12-ounce bottle. That compares with an even 100 calories in conventional light beer, or 150 or so in the full-strength variety. (Here’s a private message for Stephanie DeSutter of Molson, who spun the following prevarication to Marketing Magazine: “When people automatically think there’s anywhere from 200 to 250 calories per bottle of beer, there’s definitely a great opportunity for a brand like 67 to come in and make that calorie call-out.” Which people? Badly misinformed people who can’t read the nutritional information on their beer label? That’s the market you’re targeting?)

There have been other ultra-low calorie lagers before, and they’ve all been rejected by consumers. I used to buy something called Alta, a product of the Blitz-Weinhard brewery in Portland, that also hit the scales at 67 calories. It was quite tasteless indeed, but kept a fellow hydrated, and the price was right for school-kid budgets. I can’t imagine that the new Molson product will be any better, or any good at all, but the marketers seem determined to avoid Jerry Della Femina’s last-century missteps.

The National Post newspaper reports that Molson is using a blog-trolling service called Radian 6 to scope out comments about the new brew, and an article adds that the company will “respond to those consumers in what it calls ‘Direct to Drinker’ engagement.” I guess we’ll see exactly how that works, but if you’re planning on engaging this blogger, Ms. DeSutter, please leave the stepped-on suds in your office.

The original Mad Man?

Now, if Jerry Della Femina had personally showed up on your granddad’s doorstep, and instructed him to drink Gablinger’s, well, things might have played out differently. JDF is a biggish gentleman whose shaved-head-and-beard was a trademark in the days when he, along with Shel Silverstein, Yul Brenner and the fictive pair of Mr. Clean and Lex Luther, were the only lads sporting that particular look. Then Kojak and Michael Jordan joined the gang. Now, the denuded-skull-with-goatee is the other side of the new normal, accompanied by a weak beer in front of you, to complete the image.

Last week, Mr. and Mrs. J.T. Grossmith showed up in town, following a year-long road trip hither and tither, during which time we’ve failed to keep in touch using Skype.

J.T., the male component in the couple, has affected the Full, Complete Jerry Della Femina, but, to his credit, wouldn’t accept a Molson Canadian 67 when I offered to treat him at the neighborhood pub, and agreed to a glass of white wine. Something about a shaved head seems to accentuate a man’s eyes, and I was surprised to see that I’d never really paid any attention to J.T.’s peepers during the 30 years of our friendship. His are what I would call extraordinarily cop-like, which I may elaborate upon during a future occasion: say, if I ever get around to scribbling that police-procedural novel I think I may have in me.

Perhaps, if Ms. DeSutter and her team are open to a marketing opportunity involving strategic product placement, I may call the book “Badge 67,” and it may feature a bald, cruel-eyed detective who watches his waistline by drinking watery lager — and is miserable, as a consequence. I’m keeping most of the plot under my hat, but part of the dramatic tension will come as the detective searches high and low, both in lowdown dives and swell joints, looking for the miscreant who stole two-thirds of the flavor from his bottle of beer.

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• More about struggling beer brands, in Mitch’s April 2009 post about Rolling Rock.

Starbucks and the death of hipster capitalism

Taster's choice? Hard to imagine

Howard Schultz, the visionary behind Starbucks, is worth $1.1 billion, which makes him one of the most successful businessmen of the Boomer cohort, and I’m saddened to read that he has completely lost his mind.

I began to question the lad’s commercial sense a year ago, when Schultz introduced instant oatmeal into his stores, and insisted it was a superior offering, absolutely the best oatmeal ever. I tried it. It was swill. At the time, you had to wonder the extent to which Schultz’s instincts would eventually decline, and I pondered the seemingly ludicrous notion that Starbucks might soon try to sell instant coffee to accompany the dreadful reconstituted oatmeal.

Well, as you’ve probably read, Schultz has gone and done that unlikely thing — but it’s even worse than that.

During the coming 72 hours, Starbucks will try to persuade you, by giving away samples of their new instant coffee, that the buck-a-cup synthetic is just as good as the three-dollar brewed coffee they’ve been pouring.

"You see? I told you it wasn't that bad..."

Toward what end? In the highly improbable case that the instant may not taste like something procured in bulk by the provisioning agents at the state Department of Corrections, Starbucks will have succeeded in conditioning their patrons to trade down, thus reducing their corporate revenues. Indeed, if discerning coffee-drinkers come to realize that the powdered substitute ain’t that bad, what is to prevent them from gravitating toward the neighborhood Wal-Mart, where the canny consumer can snare an entire month’s supply of the stuff, at the same price Schultz seeks for a single cup?

The question is moot, of course. Everyone knows that instant coffee is never going to be equivalent to the real stuff, in the same way that shaking a dose of generic “coffee whitener” on top of your joe is not the same as mixing in a daub of half-and-half. You can fib to yourself (or to your company’s directors), as Schultz has done, but it’s madness to think that you can pass the con along to your customers, and not suffer the consequence. There was a media buyer I used to visit, a fellow named Roy Chernoff, who used to offer up truly terrible instant coffee, out of an Old World impulse to be hospitable. I’d sip it politely and suffer silently, because Roy was a gentleman, and because I wanted very much for him to give me money. That was an altogether different set of circumstances from allowing Howard Schultz to think that I’m prepared to hand him cash to revisit my wretched-coffee-with-Roy moment. Heck with that.

What has gone wrong at Starbucks? It’s not simply that management seems anxious to diminish their brand by offering inferior new products. I’d say it’s more an issue of general entropy, the usual course of what happens when time passes by.

It isn’t Schultz’s fault that he’s become a stumble-bum overseeing an empire-in-retreat. It’s simply, sadly, that it isn’t 1984 any more, and the old acumen is likely to have suffered some wear-and-tear.

Ah, if we could all go back to the day when Howard and his buddies, all those baby boomer businessmen, used to be so adorable, as they opened their head shops and jeans stores and macrobiotic food kiosks and used record and comic book stores and leather outlets and stained-glass studios, sandblasting the walls and stripping the floors of the cheap retail space in the hip neighborhood, playing that same Moody Blues LP over and over again, filling the world’s nostrils with the stench of patchouli oil. They began as outsiders up against the forces of mainstream retailing, hipsters with a practical cut-throat streak.

Up here in Canada, once upon a time, the government even went so far as to tax funds from struggling wage-earners and redistribute them over to the little whipper-snappers who dreamed of opening up a funky candle store somewhere near the Farmer’s Market. And damned if the government didn’t want the money back — ever! It was free! Why? Just because it was so irresistable to encourage a rebellious, disaffected B.Comm.-grad who was starting a fresh new business venture in the cruel, cold world. Not very many of the hip capitalists endured for longer than a few months. As for the working-class families who financed these experiments, for their contributions they received the privilege of continuing to pay income tax until death. Hardly equitable, but that’s Canadian economics  for you.

“My dream is to bring lattes and chai tea to the masses,” is what Howard and all the other Howards might have inscribed in their high school yearbooks. (And if you’d told them then and there that they would survive only to become the kind of people who would just-add-water to packets of Nescafe and Quaker’s Oats, they probably would have threatened to idealistically pop you in the snoot.)

Things change — indeed they do — but I still can’t see this development at Starbucks as anything less than the curtain coming down on the age of the groovy entrepreneur. For Schultz won’t be content with merely trying to sell instant coffee. Watch for other, more absurd product introductions in the months to come: The world’s greatest instant chocolate pudding, accompanied with a superb spoonful of Dream Whip. The ultimate Spam sandwich on Wonder bread, topped with excellent mock-mayonnaise. A breakthrough in instant orange-y drinks, that you’ll swear is tastier than Tang, garnished with one pristine ice cube.

This isn’t what anyone would admiringly declare to be retro-chic. I fear it’s just time running out.

A hard-knock future for Rolling Rock beer

I’m trying my best this morning not to see parallels between the fate of our lives as misfits in the 21st Century, and the disturbing news about Rolling Rock beer.

Giddyap, sucker

But, just like unlucky Moe Greene and that other sorry goombah in The Godfather, you have to conclude that someone who goes to the trouble of placing a horse`s head on your mattress is trying to tell you something.

(c) 1939, Latrobe Brewing Company

Allow me that filmic comparison, for a green bottle depicting a horse`s head was the precise trademark imagery that built Rolling Rock into a semi-great brand, back when suds were sold regionally and promoted sparingly. Rolling Rock, made by the Latrobe Brewing Company in Pennsylvannia, could afford only cardboard signs for point-of-sale, which declared their brew to be the Coors of the East. Coors used to be unavailable on the right-hand side of the Rockies, where it had established word-of-mouth demand through scarcity. Liquor store owners in the suburbs of Washington, DC would pay truckers to sneak a few dozen cases back from Colorado, and would mark them up accordingly for those willing to pay.

Rolling Rock, also a pale, understated lager, and also the sole brand of its manufacturer, attempted to horn in on the Coors cachet, which was silly, because Coors was already planning its assault on the east coast. Beside which, Rolling Rock had so much more to offer, in the form of its distinctive containers.

All you can really add is `33`

Latrobe never modernized its package design, sticking with a funky 1930s look painted directly on green glass. Enhancing the oddball allure, each bottle was inscribed with the following pledge: “From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you.” Those heartfelt remarks, stiff as an unrehearsed Knights of Columbus toast, concluded with the number “33,” a throwaway reference that could only be meant to puzzle central Pennsylvannia retirees, student journalists, and others with plenty of time on their hands.

Rolling Rock was destined to become an early accoutrement of geek-chic. Just after the local Latrobe owners were ready to sell, it fell to the new bosses, the Labatt folks out of London, Ont., to pair the unchanging Rock label with David Byrne’s affecting lyric, “Same as it ever was.” Presto. Out of all the dozens of tiny independent Quaker State beer brands that were still hanging in at the tail end of the 1980s (Bartels! Gibbons! Stegmeier!), only Rolling Rock was acknowledged to be cool. Some college kids, last night`s puke still stuck to their Converse All-Stars, affectionately called it Green Death, confusing Rolling Rock with Mickey`s Big Mouth, an overproof midwestern malt liquor.

Edgy coolness, of course, is always the first signal of the coming death-rattle. Labatt was bought by Belgians, who saw to it that Rolling Rock was available in places it never belonged, such as smart pubs in the West End of London, where it was served alongside Stella Artois and other things consumed by poseurs in PriMark lesiureware. The Brits, a thirsty race, never swallowed the “33″ mystique, and didn’t know Latrobe from Le Freak. Meanwhile, the Belgians were occupied trying to control the planet’s beer consumption, and slowly nurturing quirky little brands is not part of their business plan. They ditched Rolling Rock in 2006, pocketing $82 million from Anheuser-Busch.

The A-B management team wasted no time in determining exactly what made Rolling Rock special, and then they blew it all up. Glass-lined tanks? Get rid of them. Old Latrobe? Screw that. Production was moved to a New Jersey factory, and the brand image was further destroyed by introducing a range of indifferent new products. The Belgians, fortified with a new brain trust of cut-throat Brazilian executives, which sounds like some kind of joke but isn`t, turned their sights to Busch family themselves, those fat `n` happy St. Louis mouth-breathers who tended Bud and Michelob, and were barely aware that they`d acquired Rolling Rock. Fifty-two billion bucks convinced the Busch bunch to part with their family legacy. By that point Rock sales had already fallen by a third within five years, and A-B was promoting the stuff with a sad slogan, “Born Small Town,” which underlined how the once-proud suds were pumped out alongside Bud ’n' whatnot next to a Hess refinery just off the New Jersey Turnpike.

Picturesque setting in which to imagine your beer being made

A more honest slogan would have been, ’We just don’t care.’

Well, then, here’s a surprise. The Wall Street Journal today reports that the Belgians, now calling themselves Anheuser-Busch InBev, are looking to unload Rolling Rock for a second time. They engaged Lazard Freres to go find a buyer, but were disappointed when the merchant bankers came back and said, ”No one’s willing to pay any serious money now that you idiots have destroyed the brand.” (It emerges that the Latrobe brewery, and with it any claim to continuity or legitimacy, was earlier parceled off separately to a group from Wisconsin.)

That leaves a couple of schleppers who may still be interested in picking up Rolling Rock, if the price is right. The most logical fit would be with KPS Capital Partners, which recently bought the old Genessee plant in Rochester, N.Y., and also purchased the rights to distribute Labatt stateside, which for practical purposes means metropolitan Detroit, western New York, and a couple of counties in Connecticut. Restoring the Genesee brand has proven to be a mug’s game, and my guess is that Rolling Rock isn’t about to start rolling uphill, either. With retail and tavern space tightly controlled by a couple of dominant suppliers, and with thousands of new products emerging annually from the beverage industry, it’s hard to picture the precise niche for a flattened brewski with a 1930s pedigree.

It’s just as easy these days to pay a qualified Mumbai graphic designer $75 to design a brand new logo and fresh product identity. Of course, what you can’t buy — or buy back — for $75 is your soul, and you’d be setting the stage for tragedy if you thought you could try. Rolling Rock had one: a distinctly American, pre-War soul that would have much to say to us right now in our current circumstances, except that it`s silent, quiet as the late thoroughbred sleeping next to the guy who crossed the Corleones. So, here’s our Belgian-inspired ”tribute to your good taste.” Drink up your Bud, asshole, and be like everyone else.

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• Mitch doesn’t quite get around to sampling Molson Canadian 67 in this November 2009 post