Now look, there's no disputing the fact. Our culture -- from votes to stocks, from movies to fashion -- is driven largely by what the Wise Ones advise us. I mean, what politician or CEO or studio head doesn't have a research department bubbling with smart guys churning out smart answers? But when it comes to reaching Joe-Six-Pack, maybe you can be too smart...!
Bud Light has been the #1 brand in America forever, but last year it posted an almost 3% sales decline. Whoa, with the baseball season arriving, the Bud boys had to figure out what went wrong. It now looks like what went wrong is they spent four years and millions of dollars in "exhaustive advertising research" that flopped.
Seems their high-priced consulting firm, The Cambridge Group, hasn't been studying the TV series "Mad Men" closely enough. Instead of using Bud's "traditional emotional appeals," this more cognitive cadre sold the company on "emphasizing the product's rational benefits like drinkabillity."
Bad call, it seems, and the Bud boys are angry. Some have called it a "debacle, with this scientific approach to a discipline traditionally reliant on gut calls." In an age in which science and scientists have emerged as the new high priests of a nation's zeitgeist, we may be trying to statisticalize too much. From getting votes in Congress to getting customers into movie theatres to making batting line-ups to selling beer, maybe it's still true: It's the gut, stupid!
I expect this conclusion drives some math-minded experts nutty. I mean, they're rational and logical; why can't the rest of us be too? Maybe a good way to find out would be to temporarily shut off the data banks, file away the research surveys, get out of their high-rise business complex, and belly up to the bar with the Joe-Six-Packs who feel what they drink more than think what they drink.
Good god, that's not to say Joe should be running the company and the country...! But it is to say some of the people who do now, need a little more dirt under their fingernails.....
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Never liked Budweiser. Especially ever since it sold out.
ReplyDeleteWe seem to be too caught up in numbers instead of people
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