In 2000, I up and moved to Austin, TX looking for a new career path.  I didn’t have a job or any money, so I was forced to live off a credit card until I found a gig.  I finally caught a break when the San Antonio-based Pabst Brewing Company had an opening for a Divisional Marketing Manager.  With my credit card maxed out and down to my last chance before I would have to swallow my pride and move back home, I caught a break and got the job.

Over the next 5 1/2 years I had the experience of a lifetime.  Shortly after being hired at Pabst, I was assigned the responsibility of managing the company’s flagship brand, Pabst Blue Ribbon.  Although PBR was one the country’s best-selling beer brands back in the 70′s, it had hit hard times in the 90′s and lost 90% of its volume from 1978 – 2001.

In the early 2000′s the brand was primed for a comeback.  Young adult consumers in the Northwest who hated the mass-marketing of the big brewers started to adopt and take ownership of the brand.  The brand was on fire in Portland, OR and Seattle, but how could we replicate this success when the thing that consumers liked about the brand was that we didn’t market the brand.

From 2001 – 2008, PBR doubled its volume and has reached almost ubiquitous status in urban markets around the country.  This book will dissect approximately 20 amazing things that helped Pabst Blue Ribbon make an epic comeback and help readers better understand the power of consumer influencers.

I need your help on one important piece of this project: I need a name for the book.  Please let me know if you have any ideas by leaving a comment.  If you’re more of an email kind of person, feel free to send it to me at nealdstewart (at) yahoo (dot) com.  If I choose your suggestion, I’ll send you a cool piece of breweriana.

I’m hoping to have the book finished by the end of February.

Why the change?

First off, I never really liked the last name (Blg Slice of Awesome) since it was relatively meaningless.  Second, it occurred to me last week that the best marketing is the kind that you can’t buy.  In fact, you hear people say “You can’t buy that that kind of marketing!” when they see a brand truly connecting with consumers.

• You CAN buy advertising (that’s why they call it an “advertising/media buy”) – but if you’re here reading my blog, you probably know that advertising old school thinking.
• You can’t buy product innovation that captures consumer attention and imagination.
• You can’t buy passionate consumers who recommend your brand, product or service to their friends.
• You can’t buy meaningful interactions and conversations with consumers that educate them on your brand’s folklore or functional benefits.

Of course you can spend money to facilitate these “priceless” opportunities, but you can’t flat out buy them.

So this blog will focus on the idea of the best marketing tactics being the ones you can’t buy.  Sure, I’ll have some other odds and ends here and there, but my focus will be on the ideas that connect with consumers in a personal way.

If you have an examples or ideas for marketing program that ar better than anything you can buy, email me at: nealdstewart (at) yahoo dot com.

So I am turning my attention to a new blog: mountrushmoreof.com

What is it?  mountrushmoreof.com is a blog dedicated to debating the most influential people (within a certain topic) of all-time.  For example, my first post is my Mount Rushmore of Baseball: Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson and Ted Williams.

This will work best if people participate and debate the topic – so jump over there and tell me my opinion is shit.  Just remember to tell me what your Mount Rushmore is and WHY.

I’m not going to shut this blog down, but I think I’m going to enjoy posting on this one and of course, The Turkey Sandwich Report alot more.

Whenever I see or hear Rob’s name, it instantly takes me back to 2003.  I was the Pabst Blue Ribbon Brand Manager at Pabst Brewing Company and had been working with Rob as he was writing a story for the NY Times Magazine about the increased popularity of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  I hadn’t met Rob in person, but I talked on the phone with him several times and facilitated his interviews with my boss and some other people in the company.

Although I knew Rob’s story was going to be extremely positive for the brand and he seemed to be a nice enough guy, serving as the primary media contact for Pabst was an extremely painful process.  Our upper management was fairly scared of what media coverage could bring.  They worried that the writer might say “something bad about us” or could divulge this “secret strategy” we apparently had.  All of this culminated as I ended up talking to the NYT Fact Checker on speaker phone as I sat in the CEO’s office, and tried to balance the truth and what the CEO wanted me to say as furiously scribbled his directions on a legal pad.  I remember comparing the experience to “diffusing a bomb” after it was all over.

A couple months later, I was celebrating my 30th birthday in Vegas and I was pretty sure the story was in that Sunday’s edition.  I stopped by the newsstand at Mandalay and picked up a paper.  Sure enough, Rob’s piece titled, “The Marketing of No Marketing” was on page 42 (he calls it “Pabst Unsold”).  Although it was a huge honor to have my brand and strategy documented in a publication like the NY Times Magazine, I was still really scared what the big shots would think of the final article.

Five years later, I was in New York for a conference and after a huge night out on the town with the guys from VICE Magazine, I met Rob at a coffee show in Tribecca.  I was really hungover, but it was fun to finally meet Rob and tell him about all the behind the scenes shit that went down for this story.

Fast forward to 2008.  I got book in the mail a couple weeks ago and I noticed it was written by Rob Walker and had some post-it notes bookmarking some pages.  I jumped to those pages and started to laugh.  Sure enough, it was the extended version of the NY Times story from five years ago.

Rob’s new book, Buying In hits the shelves on June 3, 2008.  The entire book is a great read, but I’m kind of partial to Chapter 6, called Rebellion Unsold.

I think those days are over because brands need to evolve and live.  Sure, a marketing plan is a great when used as a guide throughout the year, but if you’re not reacting to opportunities and having conversations with consumers, your brand is not being treated as a living, breathing creature.  In other words, you don’t have a new campaign everyday.

Here are a few ways to activate a daily campaign:

• Write a blog post that promotes something exciting about your brand or starts a conversation
• Post something on your Twitter page
• Update your website homepage with new and relevant content
• Read emails from your consumers and write back to them
• Go talk to people who sell your product – retailers or distributors
• Go to the point of purchase and talk to consumers – yours and your competitor’s

Do you have any other ideas on how to activate a daily campaign?

With that in mind and knowing that I only have 15 minutes to present, my message is pretty simple:

1. The internet is a CONVERSATION tool.  An effective website is more than an online brochure.
2. Continually evolving content is critical to engaging customers/consumers.
3. The internet IS a selling tool.  More and more, interested customers/retailers are conducting their own research online and choose which brands they want in their establishments.  If you can give them the right information and give them a way to reach you, the sale is already closed.

Here is the PowerPoint part of my presentation.  Of course this is just the visual part of the presentation, so if you have any questions, please leave a comment and I would be happy to respond.

Here’s a look at the highlights of my schedule:

Wed – travel to SD, meet with my fellow presenters to prep

Thurs – Present “Harnessing the Power of the Internet” with Eric McKay and Bob Mack.  (more on the presentation later in the week)

Fri -Thinking Outside the Pumpkin (creative ways to market your brewpub) – I have no idea what the significance of “pumpkin” is.

Saturday – Building Brewery Tour Traffic, Food and Beer Pairing panel, World Beer Cup

I’ll be posting Twitter updates thru the conference.  You can follow me at twitter.com/nealstewart

It reminded me of my days trying to create and execute on-premise promotions, which was always a difficult task.  The knee-jerk rection was to create a “canned” promotion that satisfied all of the marketing objectives (build awareness, create a brand experience, sample, etc.)

Canned on-premise promotions don’t work.  There are too many factors at play:

• type of bar (club, tavern, bar & grill, sports bar, music club, etc.
• owner/operator preferences
• consumer demo
• consumer moods and level of intoxication

The trap is that it makes total sense to try and build image and volume at key on-premise accounts where consumers are more susceptible to trying new brands via promotional activity and canned promotions are cheaper on a cost per impression basis.

The challenge is to create a program that is adaptable to different types of venues and marketing occasions while engaging consumers in a REAL way – which means TALKING to people.

Here are my Top 5 Canned On-Premise Adult Beverage Marketing Concepts That Never Work:

1. Hot chicks passing out samples – gets product in the mouths of consumers, but typically fails to make a meaningful connection with consumers.
2. The energetic promo team – brands that want to reach both males and females like the male/female promo cheerleaders.  This works for people who are already drunk, but this concept is almost a sure-fire failure at happy hour, restaurants or low-key taverns.
3. Characters and mascots – brands who have a icon like to create an environment where consumers can interact with their brand mascot and get their picture taken with it.
4. Trash and trinkets – Ahh yes…Consumers love free crap. Give-a-ways can get your foot in the door with the account and get you a little attention from the crowd.  But when you think about it, how often does a t-shirt, keychain or ballcap take a consumer from awareness to loyalist?  Not very.  In fact, I would guess that more harm is done when some consumers walk away empty handed.
5. Generic carnival games – SPIN THE PRIZE WHEEL! Unless your brand is Carnival Cruise Lines or Animal Crackers, I doubt the participants are walking away with a memorable experience.

• We grew our “followers” by 20% when we mentioned the Twitter page in our email newsletter
• Consistently posting “updates” builds “followers”
• There are other brands that are experimenting with Twitter – Southwest Airlines, jetBlue, BMW and GM to name a few.  Personally, I like following brands on Twitter as long as the updates have some substance.
• I try to post at least one Flying Dog update per day because I believe that there should be at least one thing we want to tell our consumers per day.  The exercise of thinking about what I want to tell consumers helps me stay connected with what resonates with consumers.
• I’m not sure if we’re reaching the right consumers in a meaningful way, but it’s worth a try.  All it costs is time and as a marketer, it’s helping me stay even more connected to the brand.

At the end of the match (won by Nikolay Davydenko over Rafael Nadal in a bit of an upset) they awarded the trophies to the finalists.  Just as the do in any other awards ceremony for a tennis or golf tournament, they let the head dude of the presenting sponsor speak for a minute and congratulate the participants.  Being that Sony was the sponsor, the head dude in this case was from Japan and gave a speech that absolutely no one could understand and added zero value to the ceremony or brand.

Why would Sony even bother with this?  I totally get that it’s nice to make the people who write the check feel important and the CEO needs his ego fed every once in a while.  But as the sponsor, you need to know what parts of the sponsorship package to take and which parts to respectfully decline. Same with banners.  Just because the event lets you plaster the venue with banners doesn’t mean you need to.

To me, it’s pretty simple: if the component of the sponsorship package doesn’t meet your objectives, don’t do it.  Save the CEO ego feeding for the golf course.