The Role of Research in Brand Marketing Strategy: Bud Light Gets Weighed Down

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According to a recent Advertising Age article, Anheuser-Busch hired brand strategy consultancy Cambridge Group to bring brand science to the marketing table, and Bud Light ends up with 2009 shipments dropping 2.5%, the first negative sales year for the No. 1 beer in the country. What happened? Yeah, yeah. After seeing the headline for this article (“Bud’s Big Blunder: Letting Consultants Steer Brand”), your instinct will be to blame the consultants. Until you read the whole article. Then watch a couple of the ads.

According to Ad Age, the core rational benefit of the Bud Light brand is “drinkability.” And it has been for some time:

“Drinkability had been in fine print on Budweiser’s label since the 1960s and often raised in creative briefings to communicate Bud Light’s appeal: You could drink a lot of it, and it was less watery than Coors Light and less bitter than Miller Lite. Cambridge’s process strongly endorsed it as the ideal rational benefit.”

In spite of the inflammatory headline, there’s really nothing here that supports the “sound bite of blame” indirectly slamming Cambridge Group. Yes, a great deal of research was done, the results of which were handed off to Anheuser-Busch and their agency. But by everyone’s admission, Cambridge didn’t have a finger in the creative process, and there doesn’t appear to have been a directive to take the rational benefit of “drinkability” and make it the core of the ad campaign. Nor did the research appear to say “throw out all emotion, and just focus on the rational benefit.”

The fact is that CMOs are under increasing pressure to bring a little science to the creative process – as they should be. Which aspects of the brand have the greatest traction? How can touchpoints be optimized to drive desired results? Where is our marketing investment driving the greatest return?

The answers to these questions, and many related issues, is in marketing and customer research. What drives customer experience, brand perception and desired customer behaviors can be assessed by talking to the source of your revenue: your customers. But the kinds of answers you get will be based on the questions you ask. And even more importantly, you – and your agency – need to know what to do with those answers.

Is “drinkability” dead? No. In the immortal words of Monty Python, “It’s not dead, it’s only resting.” But if your agency takes the rational benefit for the brand and forgets the core underlying principles of buyer behavior (that we all make emotional buying decisions, but these need to be supported by rational benefits) then there’s no huge surprise when the sales dial doesn’t spin.

It’s a little like love. No matter how much your brain tells you someone’s “right” for you, if your heart isn’t engaged there’s simply no spark. And if your ad agency appears to forget that emotion is how you sell and logic is how you justify, then no matter how funny or highly produced your ads, they probably won’t be moving the dials that equate to increased sales.

So just don’t tell me about “drinkability.” Tell me how it makes me feel, and why I should care. And to better understand the answer to that question, it probably makes sense to do a little more research (or read beyond the summary pages of research results).

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