Brand Managers are complaining that consumers are getting
less loyal by the years. They blame the competition, counterfeit products,
millennial generations, among other things, but sometime it is really their
fault, they just never see it that way.
Sometime you need to “experiment” and innovate your products
or brands to keep it exciting and relevant to market. It could be that the
order to experiment is given by higher Management who are good with managing money,
but understands nothing about Branding compared to you). Some other time,
especially in the case of an established / stable / heritage brand, the best
course of action is to leave it as it is and not attempt to fix something that
is not broken.
Which bring us to his case of Tiger Beer and their new
extension of Cucumber Mint Radler: Screw it.
It’s not just a drink.
Well, Asia Pacific Breweries (APB, the manufacturer), to you
this may look like an exciting new product extension, to make more money from
uninformed consumers, but you have crossed the line here. Radler isn’t the same
with flavored beer. It is probably similar to Shandy in Australia or other
parts of the world, but it has a back story to it that need to be kept as tradition.
There is no Cucumber-flavored Radler brewed by a self-respecting breweries in
Germany. So why would you do this? Because you can’t skip a good deal on
leftover cucumber flavor additives offered by your supplier? Remember the Classic
Coke incident? You can launched new bottle size, vanilla flavor, sugar-free-but-with-artificial-sweetener,
but you don’t mess up with the traditional, original Coca-Cola unless there is
a need to do so.
As far as I know, the Germans are not crazy historically
about drinking cucumber juice. Don’t get me wrong, make all the flavored beer
you want: chili, curry, Kickapoo, I don’t care, just don’t call it Radler.
I probably care about this too much, but if you have ever
did a 2-hour long hike in Europe during Summer, and finished the hike with a
cold Radler, you would worship the drinks. It practically saves your life, and
you would stand up to this Cucumber Radler heresy. What’s worse, I have been
supporting Tiger Beer personally for many years. I even picked a case study on
them in my university time. This is definitely a big turn-off for me, and they
can expect to sell less Tiger Beer to me, and I hope all Radler lovers would do
the same. It is not because I am not loyal. I have been loyal and be a promoter
for more than a decade, but if you screw up, you take the blame, Don’t blame it
on the consumer.
An ineffective Marketing or just Bad Marketing?
This is of course not the first Cucumber “Radler”, there is at
least another one in Lithuania (read: not Germany). But maybe that’s what you
can expect from APB’s typical move in the recent time: ‘copy others’. Tiger Beer’s
recent campaign was the ‘Born in Singapore’ campaign where they do label
customization to different localities in Singapore, which is a lazy copycat act
from Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign with personalized name labeling. I’m
not sure if it boost sales at all, but I will be nice and call it probably an ineffective Marketing
effort. I don’t see any reason people in Tanjong Pagar would like buy a beer
that ‘Tanjong Pagar’ on the label just because, whichisn’t the case for Coke.
Marketing mistakes probably will not boost sales as you have
expected, but Bad Marketing turns customers away. Like this Cucumber Radler.
This is a good example of “it may takes months or years to acquire a customer,
but a single mistake to lose them.”
Uncultured consumers
I know lots of consumers wouldn’t see anything wrong with
this, just like some manufacturers don’t see anything wrong about abusing
employees and employing child labor. We have different value system, I get it.
There are lots consumers who just don’t care about what they
consume, be it for its tradition value (especially if it is not their
tradition) or even for their own well-being. Take pizza with pineapple toppings
for example, there is Hawaiian pizzas sold all over the world. I am sure as
hell that the Canadians who invented it and the rest of the world who eats it
don’t feel an inch of shame about it. If you are one of these people, please
don’t identify yourself, because an Italian would think that you are an
uncultured swine.
If you would like to seek mutual respect and a healthy logic
(the world will be a better place if more people are behaving this way), imagine
if you are an Asian who likes char kuay
teow (fried kway teow) and one day you find out that a foreigner sells it overseas,
but he is using barbecue sauce or mushroom sauce instead of soya sauce, and
using yellow noodles instead of rice noodle, call it fried kway teow, selling it
as Asian food, and the local consumers there like it and think it’s original,
won’t you find it disturbing?
This topic is of course something personal to me. I am
absolutely ignorant on things that I don’t find interesting (e.g. fashion,
celebrities, cheap novels), but I takes things that I put into my body rather
seriously, and so should you. I also do not like to be cheated on or lied to,
and so should you. Because if you tell Germans (or Austrians) that you are
crazy about Cucumber Radler, they would probably think that you are just an insane
swine.
It always fascinates me how Consumer Marketing can sell you
something that you don’t need. There’s a lot of art and science about it. The
case of Tiger Beer selling Radler that isn’t a Radler is probably a sub-variant
of it: how to sell stuff to uncultured swine.
By the way, APB is not even a Singaporean company anymore.
Heineken bought it some time ago, but it is such a mystery, because Heineken is
great at Marketing.
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