Back to basic - San Miguel

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]

The Supercooled Coke

Coca-Cola Hong Kong launched a new type of cola recently (Not sure about the exact date, but very likely just last week).

Scientifically gimmicky
What's special about the new cola is its cooling to ice in front of the customer. It is originally liquid, but when it is shaken or as it comes out of the vending machine, it quickly condense into solid. As a science student who majored Chemistry in the undergraduate years, I instantly recognised it as a phenomenon of supercooling when I came across with it for the first time. (I am not going into details here. If you are interested in how it works, please visit science forums for detailed scientific explanations.)

A real differentiating product
I think this supercooled coke (I am not sure about its official name yet, but let's call it this way as it must be correct from a science sense) is a very cool idea indeed. It is not only gimmicky but totally new to the category. In fact not just the soft drink category, but new to all beverages. Nobody has ever done this before (Supercooled sprite was launched in UK before, but it was Coca-Cola company too). It is a very rare product that really differentiates miles apart from other competitors.

Why line extend but not start it brand new?
However, it makes me wonder, with such a product differentiation in hand, why didn't Coca-Cola just launch a new brandwith a different name instead of building of its flagship product. The product could have been better off as a totally new line because that will open up a new category and that will be what marketers craves about -- The Blue Ocean strategy. It will help the classic coke by occupying the "cooling and thirst-killing" proposition so that the classic coke can focus on "happiness" without having to change from time to time to remind consumers of its functional benefit. But now it is just another variation of the classic coke. It can never become the real thing and its potential to open new category is buried and grounded. I think this marketing move represents a huge opportunity wasted.

By the way, if you are interested to learn more about supercooling, the following resources will help.
http://hypography.com/forums/watercooler/12522-beer-freezing-trick.html