San Miguel kicked off its latest promotional efforts that centered around friendship earlier this year. The campaign's slogan "一支啤酒，一班朋友", if translated directly from Chinese, becomes "A bottle of beer, a bunch of friends". Feels pretty like those "One world, one dream" or "One team, one goal" thing for me...
Anyway, I did not want to comment on the execution or media mix but the idea in this post. Have a feeling the "friendship" idea is too basic for a beer or, more broadly, alcohol brand today. Let me take a wild guess, people has known about the relationship between alcohol and friendship since 2000 years ago, if not earlier. One of the actions the alcohol takes in human body, besides keeping warm, is relaxing mind and tuning down defence, which in turn makes people confess more easily and befriends with strangers more comfortably.
Evolve with your category and differentiate yourself
Because friendship is so basic, it must have been used as a proposition in beer advertising years ago. It feels very much like "convenience" for convenience stores. Convenience is what convenience stores like 7-11 and Circle K brings to people, obviously (That's where they get their names from too). When the category was first invented, when people had no idea about convenience stores, they had to tell people about this selling point of convenience. So we had the great line 梗有一間係左近 from 7-11 fifteen or twenty years ago. Look at what 7-11 sells today. They of course have more shops than before, but they no longer sell their ubiquity.Their proposition evolves into a relationship with customers. This is a great example of a proposition evolving to suit a maturing category.
So what about the beer category? It's a fully matured category with many niche brand capturing different market segments. It does not make much sense to me to use "friendship" in advertising and promotion today because every beer brand has it. Friendship is not a differentiating attribute that can carve out a piece against the competition.
San Miguel the local beer of Hong Kong
What's different about San Miguel compared to other beer brands is its local image. Now that they have re-opened their brewery in Yuen Long, they can legitimately make the "Local" claim. Only god knows why they settled on friendship when they could celebrate their relationship with the city.
All it takes is a twist
Still about the idea, on the how to say this time. Even if San Miguel had settled on this dull "friendship" what to say, shouldn't they sound playful and witty in their advertising with a better how to say? My memories about San Miguel's advertising are those from Stephen Chow and the one that got Hong Kong out of the haunt of SARS (videos below). The style was one key that defined the brand.
Contrary to San Miguel's recent dullness, one similar ad from Jack Daniels I saw months ago on ads of the world a few months ago got the same job nicely done. Built on the same what to say, they infused the how to say with a twist that relates to "Socialism" and a connection with the American Presidential election, the advertisement stands out from the crowd and impressed me very much.
Oh, please do not state it so directly with such an Olympic-ish and sport-team-ish line of "A bottle of beer, a bunch of friends". Advertising that is fun to read and true to your brand is not demanding to make. All it takes is a twist in how you say the same thing.
[picture via http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/jack_daniels_tennessee_whiskey_socialist?size=_original
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/jack_daniels_tennessee_whiskey_democracy?size=_original]
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