Thank you to everyone who entered our contest for Best Un-Approvable Beer Name. While we received many excellent entries, we were only able to choose one winner. The Beer Industry Summit ticket was awarded to John Harris and the design team at Battalion Social Design! Here is their winning entry:Thanks again to everyone who entered!

You could win a ticket to the 2010 Beer Industry Summit worth $1100! Simply come up with the best beer name that would never get approved by the Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) and you’ll be on your way to one of the largest beer events in the industry!

About the Conference

The conference gathers 500 professionals from the beer industry to the Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa in Phoenix, AZ from February 28th to March 1st to talk about the biggest issues in beer. Join our own Ted Wright as he and a panel of industry veterans talk about how to use word-of-mouth marketing to generate crazy growth rates for your brands! Other major topics of discussion at the Summit include:

• Latino beer drinkers and how to reach them
• Distributor consolidation
• What’s driving craft beer growth…

And much more!

How to Enter

Come up with the best beer brand name that would never get approved by the TTB. Bonus points for sending a mockup label to go with your beer name or doing anything else that we think is funny. Email your entry to BeerSummitContest@fizzcorp.com by Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 11:59pm Eastern Standard Time (EST) with “Beer Summit Ticket” as the subject line. Yep, it’s that simple.Entries will be judged on the following criteria:

• Humor
• Cleverness in breaking rules
• Unapprovability
• General wit

Entries will be judged solely by the team at Fizz (herein known as “Fizz”). All entry decisions are final and at the sole discretion of Fizz. The winner will be contacted on February 5, 2010 via the email address the entry is submitted with.

Contest Rules (a.k.a. “The Fine Print”)

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. PURCHASE WILL NOT IMPROVE CHANCES OF WINNING.All winners must be 21 years of age or older, unless otherwise stated and/or posted.

1. Entering Contests and Choosing and Contacting Winners

Entrants must send entries using the correct contest entry email address, subject line, and any other specific entry information requested in the contest announcement. Fizz is not responsible for and will not consider incomplete or incorrect entries or emails sent but not received by Fizz for any reason, as potential contest winners.Only one entry per email address used to send the email will be considered for contest entry, unless multiple entries are specifically allowed in the contest posting. Unless otherwise specified in an individual contest post, no person may enter any contest more than once using multiple email addresses.Once a winner is selected and notified, failure to respond by the response date shall mean that the winner forfeits the prize. Fizz is not required to award elsewhere any prizes forfeited by the chosen winner(s).

2. Submission of photo, text or other content for Contests

Entries selected for display and to win “best of” contests and any other contests requiring photo, text or other content from the entrants will be judged entirely at the discretion of Fizz.By submitting any photo or information to Fizz, you hereby grant to Fizz and its affiliates, subsidiaries, licensees and assigns, an irrevocable, perpetual and royalty-free right to use, reproduce, edit, display, transmit, prepare derivative works of, modify, publish and otherwise make use of the submitted photo or other information in any and all media, whether now known or hereinafter created, throughout the world and for any purpose. The rights granted to Fizz include but are not limited to the right to resize, crop, censor, compress, edit, feature, caption, affix logos to, and to otherwise alter or make use of the submitted photo.By submitting any photo or information to Fizz, you hereby represent and warrant that the submitted photo or information does not and shall not infringe on any copyright, any rights of privacy or publicity of any person, or any other right of any third party, and you have the right to grant any and all rights and licenses granted to Fizz herein, including but not limited to all necessary rights under copyright, free and clear of any claims or encumbrances.You acknowledge and agree that Fizz shall have no obligation to post, display or otherwise make publicly available any photo or information submitted by you, and may, in its sole and unfettered discretion, remove, edit, modify or delete any photo or information that you submit to Fizz.You understand and intend that any photo or information submitted by you to Fizz may be available for viewing, rating, review and comment on by the public, and understand that comments or ratings with which you disagree or are unhappy about may be published or otherwise become associated with any photo or information you submit to Fizz. By submitting any photo or information to Fizz, you hereby waive any privacy expectations that you may have with respect to any such photo or information submitted by you to Fizz.You hereby agree to hold Fizz and its affiliates, subsidiaries, licensees sponsors and assigns harmless from and against, and hereby waive any right to pursue, any claims of any nature arising in connection with the inclusion in, publication via or display on any Fizz site, or any other use authorized under these Terms, of any photo or information submitted to Fizz by you.Photos or information submitted by you shall be the property of Fizz, and Fizz shall have no obligation to preserve, return or otherwise make available to you or others any photos or information so submitted.

3. Awarding Prizes

Winners are solely responsible for all taxes and/or fees that may be incurred.Winners may not request substitutions of prize winnings. All winners are solely responsible for any and all taxes and/or fees, and all such additional costs that may be incurred.Fizz, Fizz clients, and employees of Fizz or its clients may not be held liable for any warranty, costs, damage, injury, or any other claims incurred as a result of usage of any winners of a prize once possession has been taken of the product by winner. Fizz is not liable for any loss arising out of or in connection with or resulting from any contest promoted by Fizz.If the specified prize becomes unavailable due to unforeseen circumstances, Fizz may substitute a prize of like or equal value.Management, employees and families of Fizz are prohibited from winning any prizes awarded by Fizz.Fizz reserves the right to alter any rules of any contest at any time.

This blog post was written by Neal Stewart and first appeared on his blog You Can’t Buy That. It is re-published with permission – ed.

Seth’s blog post got me thinking about this today…

When I worked on PBR, we focused most of our efforts on word of mouth or “buzz marketing.”  Mostly because we didn’t have any money, but also because the young adult, hipster consumer resisted mainstream mainstream marketing and embraced brands that didn’t market.  The hipsters were the ones rediscovering, reinventing and advocating the brand.

Believe it or not, the concept of hipsters drinking PBR was a hard idea to sell internally back in 2001-2003.  You gotta remember that the brand was living on middle-aged, blue collar men who drank it because it was cheap.  It wasn’t sold on-premise and it was a forgotten brand.  So when it came to convincing all of the big shots that this brand had a chance with a new consumer base, we rationalized it by telling them that it was being embraced because these consumers resisted mainstream marketing.

Is that true?  Do even the most fickle and anti-establishment of consumers “hate” marketing?  Here we are, six years later and I say that it is totally false.  I think consumers LOVE marketing.  BUT, they only love it when it’s authentic and meaningful to them.  If it’s fake, consumers, whether they are cynical hipsters or not will REJECT it.

That’s the beauty of social media, sampling and experiential marketing programs.  All of these tactics are real because the consumer is interacting and having a conversation with a real person.

Coincedentally, when we scaled up the PBR program, we hired more people to go out there and have conversations.  Even the hipsters knew that these people were there to MARKET to them.  But they were totally fine with it. Why? Because it was REAL.

From Beer Business Daily. January 27, 2009 

IS WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING THE NEW KILLER BEER APP?  

Last week we caught up with Ted Wright, who is the managing partner at Atlanta-based Fizz, a word of mouth marketing firm.  Ted has worked on brands from Pabst Blue Ribbon to chocolate milk, and has based his firm on the data showing that mass media is out and viral, word of mouth marketing is in.  Here is a short excerpt of our talk, with a longer piece coming in MBA. 

TED ON FOUR STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL WORD OF MOUTH.  ”Prior to doing this whole thing we said, okay, there’s four steps to this:  focus, design, delivery, and report. Those are the four steps to making a great word of mouth campaign. The first step is “focus”, and that’s really coming up with a story that is interesting, relevant, and authentic. If a story is interesting, relevant and authentic, it will get passed around.  Stories that fail on any of those three points, don’t get shared.  I know everyone’s talking about [Bud Light's] Drinkability these days.  To us, Drinkability is a failure as a marketing campaign, because it is inauthentic. Is Bud Light authentically more drinkable about than any other light beer?  Saying Bud Light has Drinkability is like a Hyundai saying you can drive their cars to work. Duh, it’s a car! Other than the externalities out there, like Lamborghini, I could drive almost any car to work.  The same is true for beer, they all have ‘Drinkability’. People don’t actively share stories that they think are inauthentic. “     

ON THE DEATH OF TV.  ”Our data shows that when a friend shares a story with another friend the listener will go and spend his/her own money to try that product 93 times out of 100.  Television gets someone to buy a specific beverage brand about seven times out of 100. Print is even worse. The C-suite can do the math and this is what is driving them to word of mouth marketing. Dogfish Head and PBR are good beer examples. Tito’s vodka, Izze soda, Monster energy drink and VeeV are other beverage brands that have taken advantage of word of mouth marketing. Tito’s went 1,000 cases a year to about 225,000 cases a year all on word of mouth.   The fact is that the average North American consumer is bombarded with 6,300 commercial messages a day.  That’s just too many so people tune out everything.  When the story outside the bottle matches what’s going inside the bottle, and the story is interesting, relevant and authentic, then the story is shared. Consumers sharing of stories = an increase in brand share.”  

ON PBR’s EARLY SUCCESS.  ”I know that you personally, Harry, keep mentioning retro and PBR. But I would like to tell you that retro has got little, if anything, to do with PBR’s success.  I think the authentic story about PBR is authenticity itself. Let me tell you why.  PBR at a certain point in its life stopped spending money on broadcast advertising. They went about 15 years and did not do much broadcasting at all. Times changed and PBR stayed true to it’s roots. Not because they had some over arching philosophy but because they didn’t spend money on much marketing at all. PBR found many of it’s accounts had been rediscovered by “hipsters” and their salesmen kept doing what they had always been doing, Sansabelt slacks and all.  These bars were now populated by people who grew up and were born in the ’80s and rejected what they saw as a materialistic way of living. They were saying, ‘you guys did all that yuppie stuff, I think that’s not real. I think that’s fake, and I’m going to go and seek those things that are real.’  Since PBR didn’t have any money, by default, all they could do was things that were authentic.  Salesmen went around,  wore their Sansabelt slacks, and they said, “Hey, I really like my beer, you should buy my beer. If you don’t like it, that’s cool too.  That’s how they were selling. So we basically took that ethos of, this is who we are, and we’re going to celebrate things that are authentic.  Brian [Kovalchuk, former Pabst chief] and Neal [Stewart, former PBR brand manager, now at Flying Dog] bought off on this idea, and we all kind of came up with this together.  “We could have gone the ‘red, white and blue’ route, we could have gone ‘Americana’. There was also a whole PBR/trucker hat/retro kind of thing happening. We intentionally did not do the retro thing, because retro is a fad, and celebrating the authentic is a choice.  We want to work with choices not fads.  Brian, Neal and the rest of the team, us included, created a program around the twin ideas of word of mouth marketing and a brand ethos of “authentic”. In was mini-Kiss, low rider bikes, turning washing machines in to beer coolers and Vice magazine parties. Out was anything we deemed inauthentic like Kid Rock or plastic promo girls. We wanted to be involved with anything that people were doing because they liked doing it. By going out there and supporting people that are authentic, and not asking anything of them in return some asked about our brand. The more we shared with them, the more they liked it. Some liked it so much that decided to spread the word like a Baptist preacher in a tent. With a lot of hard work by Pabst staff, agency folk, distributors and fans of PBR the brand has grown into the phenom it is today.”

Thanks to the good folks at BBD for the interest in WOMM and Fizz – ed.

Greetings all. Fizz greatly enjoyed this year’s Beverage Forum. Many new tweaks from the good folks at BMC made this Forum the best one Fizz has ever attended.

What we were most struck by this year was how WOMM has become the mainstream driver for growth in the beverage industry. BMC reports that in just five short years Monster has almost caught Red Bull in volume sold in the US. Monster made it clear to attendees that their success is based on word of mouth marketing that is interesting to the consumer, relevant to their target and authentic to the Monster brand. Go Monster go!

Dogfish Head Brewing made similar comments but with an eastern flair in their presentation on the Tao of Marketing. It is the marriage of great beer and effective word of mouth marketing that the president of Dogfish Head said has taken them from the smallest commercial brewer in America (that 1400th out of 1400) to the 34th largest with $30,000,000 in annual sales. Mmmmmmm Dogfish! 

The other interesting point from the year’s Forum – those brands that spend their time talking about their great commercials and all of the “impressions” they get from banner ads are making headlines today either as an acquisition target or turning in poor sales results vs. their competitors.

 WOMM rules! Get on the bus or get bought by a smarter competitor. You have been warned.

Excellent articles and reporting from this year’s craft brewers conference in San Diego is available from Harry Schuhmacher and his crew at Beer Business Daily. Find them at http://www.beernet.com/. At this year’s conference, there was a great panel of craft brewers talking about differentiation and “beer buzz”. Later, Fizz was asked to comment and this is what we said -

In our realm, differentiation is critical because it can drive sales. However, differentiation can become silly* as entrepreneurs seek to enter a market but all existing positions seem to be taken.

I share with you the two tests that Fizz uses when working with clients on differentiation:

1) “WGAF” An acronym that stands for “Why should someone Give A Fuck?”. This test flows from Nietzsche’s famous comment that I paraphrase in the following way - once humans understand the “why” of something the “who”, “what”, “when”, “where” and “how” will fall into place. This test forces a supplier to articulate a compelling story as to why a consumer would exchange their precious resources for that brewer’s product.  

2) “Interesting, Relevant and Authentic”Differentiation is great but for the “different” story to be shared by one customer to another it has to meet the three criteria below. Fail on any of the three criteria and the beer won’t get talked about. Beer that is not talked about does not sell well.   

“Interesting” – The story has to be interesting to those Influencer beer consumers otherwise they will not pay attention.  

“Relevant” – The story has to be relevant to someones beer drinking life. Irrelevant = not talked about.  

“Authentic” – The story has to be immediately recognizable to the consumer as “authentic” to the beverage brand or category. Fail in this and a brand spends all of it’s time convincing consumers that what it is saying is “true” rather than spending it’s time sharing their brand story with as many people as possible.  

*We were working our gin client’s booth three years ago at WSWA. On our right, Ed McMahon’s vodka and on our left, vodka in a replica Kalashnikov bottle. When Ed and “that gun guy” are launching in a category you know it is going to be “silly” for sometime to come. The fruit beer craze of 2000-2001 would be another example.

We look forward to your comments.