There is a defined set of images and feelings every company would prefer to spring to mind when consumers think about their “brand”. Each one is unique. What works quite well for one brand could spell death for another. Understanding the suit you’re wearing and what buttons to push while wearing it can be much easier than starting to play a different game and publicly changing your appearance. Take a product like Coors Light. The popular beer is bottled and canned by the Coors Brewing Company, and they have worked hard over the years to become associated with its general drink-ability and a wide array of a good time. It’s not a heavy beer and is not generally marketed toward people who go out of their way to call themselves beer connoisseurs. The same company manufactures Coors original. Coors original is marketed toward blue collar audience and is dubbed “the banquet beer”. Where Coors Light is geared toward a playful and fun time, Coors original is promoted as basic, simple, high quality, and American made. Both products are under the Coors brand however and have similarities in terms of promoted quality and the use of Rocky Mountain water to brew. Generally speaking, the Coors Brewing Company manufactures a typical, consistent, American style beer and is branded accordingly. In recent years, the market for craft beer has exploded creating much more competition for such brands than ever before. Compare Coors’ product to the product of Samuel Adams and you see differences. Samuel Adams has many more styles to offer and a variety of flavors to choose from. It generally always has a higher alcohol content and is not sold on its drink-ability, but it’s complexity. Samuel Adams will have you know they used “hints” of this and “nodes” of that. The brand they communicate is anchored more toward higher quality, complexity and tradition. Between the two, Coors has a more recognizable brand, so if they want to compete with any market share Samuel Adams could take away from them they need to bottle something else entirely, and they do. Many of the big name breweries will assist in bottling the brands of other companies to have more of the craft beer market, or create one of their own. But Coors, Budweiser, and Miller don’t try to re-brand. They invent a different product entirely, and push that out to market, pretend they have nothing to do with it except when pressed, and benefit from selling to multiple kinds of beer drinkers. Why? It requires little effort to advertise, and is honestly exponentially simpler than uprooting existing successful brand names in a pathetic attempt to change their identity in the eyes of the public.

Written by Guest Blogger – Ken Pellegrino.   Ken Pellegrino is a freelance writer and part-time marketer at Purple Diamond LLC with a background in business management, marketing, sales and customer relations. A graduate from Salem State University’s Bertolon School of Business with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Marketing, Ken shares his passion for marketing and sales with the owner of Purple Diamond, his mother, Charlene St Jean. In addition to his love of marketing, Ken is also a talented guitarist who enjoys both writing and playing music.