

I'm a Coors man - youngj
http://floodlite.tumblr.com/post/1035628039/im-a-coors-man

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mattmaroon
"As it turns out, most beers are pretty much the same, well, with the
exception of Guinness. When it comes to taste, the key factor isn’t the
craftsmanship or ingredients, but the advertising budget."

As a craft brewer myself, statements like that hurt deep in my soul. Of course
mass-produced swill all tastes the same, it all uses the same craftsmanship
(not much) and ingredients. It's all the same type of beer (some goofy ass
mixture of grains including rice and/or corn, mild hops, and lager yeast
brewed at standard lager temperatures).

The comparison to Guinness is ridiculous as well. It's as if they gave people
4 shots of vodka and one of tequila and said "look, all liquor other than
tequila tastes the same!"

Throw some real lagers in there and I bet they'd stand out even with the
labels removed. Not as far as a stout obviously, but nobody could mistake a
Boston Lager for a Budweiser.

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look_lookatme
You are reading this as if it's a taste competition, but it's not. It's about
companies that basically offer the same product, but differentiate based on
brand awareness. Guinness is so radically different than these American macro
brews so it provides useful context.

Tequila or vodka (not together, separate) would be very interesting studies,
too. I'm not convinced that anyone but connoisseurs would rate blind vodka
taste tests consistent with their preferred brand.

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rubashov
> vodka taste tests

The bottom shelf to mid shelf price increment is pretty damn obvious in taste.
The cheap stuff is bad. Once you're paying over ~$35 per liter I doubt anyone
can tell anything apart.

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evilduck
That misses the point though. The cheap stuff is all equally bad, anyone who
proclaims themselves a loyalist to Smirnoff probably knows nothing of the
high-end stuff, let alone be able to tell it apart from it's peer competitors.
Likewise, a "Coors man" can easily be fooled into drinking Miller or Bud,
because he doesn't base his preference on any quality of the beer itself.

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patrickk
_"If you’re going to compete, you have two choices. The first is to spend a
boatload of money on advertising—like Microsoft. The second is to create
something so unique and different that people can easily recognize your
product—like Guinness."_

Guinness also spends boatloads on advertising (here in Ireland they're not
that unique as we've got several choices of stout for sale, the main ones
being Murphys and Beamish apart from Guinness). I'm sure Guinness also
advertise heavily in the US and other markets. So it's incorrect to present
this as two choices. Two major advertising campaigns Guinness used in recent
months include "Arthur's Day" celebrations and the Guinness ads throughout the
decades. The former seems a bit of a gimmick to me, but the latter was
interesting IMO as a way of showing how advertising changed over the years.

~~~
dabent
I've seen Guinness ads plenty here in the US. I also see plenty of ads for
other "unique" products. Even if one makes a stand-out product, people still
have to know about it.

~~~
patrickk
_"I also see plenty of ads for other "unique" products."_

I guess that's the whole "build it and they won't come" argument. It requires
good marketing to convince people to try a Guinness or buy an iPad or whatever
(although the iPad is probably a bad example as it's not unique, Microsoft had
the courier in 2003).

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fragmede
Yes of course Guinness sticks out. Guinness is the only Irish dry stout in the
list which is a different product entirely, once you're discussing beer. To
non-beer drinkers they are all lumped into the 'beer' category, but that's
unfortunate point to illustrate because that cool new web startup? In the same
hyperopic view, they're all websites, and Hipmunk is the same as Wikipedia is
the same as Techcrunch and you need an advertising budget the size of Google
or Microsoft's to build stand-alone brand awareness

~~~
dmix
The point of the experiment was to demonstrated how the brand affected how the
different beers stood out.

The fact that Guinness stood out was just there to show that without a brand
you need to be significantly different (in this case, different tasting) in
order to stand out.

~~~
bmelton
But Guinness isn't all that unique... for a Stout. It's unique compared to the
other beers listed, just as if the comparison were done with Wikipedia,
Dictionary.com, TechCrunch and Youtube. There are obvious differences in scope
and purpose between the first three, but mainly, they're websites with mostly
text, whereas Youtube is a website with mostly video. In a 'website'
comparison, YouTube would be the standout, but if you did a more specific
comparison between Break, YouTube, Vimeo and RedTube, you might find that
RedTube is the standout, and YouTube fares on average with the others.

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mhb
If you too were wondering what sort of thing a "perceptual map" is that looks
like a 2D graph but doesn't have axes, the description below suggests that the
article has just inexplicably omitted the axes.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_mapping>

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carbocation
Guinness is an unfortunate component to this test. Whereas the other beers may
have the same color, taste, and mouthfeel, Guinness would be distinguishable
from those on any one of those 3 dimensions. Even if you couldn't distinguish
based on taste or texture, the color alone would give it away.

In other words, you would probably guess that you're drinking a Guinness if
you happen to see its color. I think that's a significant confounder here.

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cellularmitosis
For those of you unfamiliar with beer, I'll rephrase this article in terms
which might be more familiar to you. Hopefully you'll have the same "wtf?"
moment I did.

We had people place five cars on a perceptual map. The five vehicles consisted
of four medium sedans and one pickup truck. When branding badges were removed,
we found that people tended to lump the four sedans together on a perceptual
map, while placing the pickup truck off by itself.

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fizx
Search is about what the engine misses, not what it hits. If Google hits 99%
and Bing 98%, in some sense, Google is twice as good. You wouldn't call 98%
site uptime "basically 100%."

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CapitalistCartr
This is a laughably stupid piece. It says nothing new about beer and
everything about the amazing ignorance of the author. There are so many beers
and even types of beer, that to consider Coors, Pabst, Miller Lite, Budweiser,
Colt 45 and Guinness to represent a cross-section of beers requires him to
willfully avoid learning anything about beer.

Conventional American lagers are ONE type of beer in am ocean, The range from
stouts to wheat beers is astounding. This is as if I compared only cars from
China, and threw in one Chevy to analyze the car market.

He ignores the fast-growing premium stuff, e.g. Sam Adams. Every town has its
own version; here in Tampa, it's Ybor Gold. Of course they don't,
individually, sell as much as Budweiser; by definition, a local brew is only
local.

Yes, better beer is more expensive. That cheaper beer sells more is hardly
news. But to think he's found any information in a test that is designed to
produce the result he got is nonsense. Of course, five cheap, American lagers
taste about the same, and of course, it's obvious that an Irish stout tastes
different.

I have a Welsh, beer-loving GF; the author could at least try Wikipedia.

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itblarg
I did quite a few perception mapping exercises while I was in business
school.* They get really interesting when you take experiment a level deeper
and seek to understand how different customer segments perceive your
brand/product.

For example, the beer study would get much more interesting if one could
assess the results by segment - say "beer expert", "college student", "joe
blue collar", etc. The outcomes can really inform positioning and
message...and can lead to product extensions based purely around marketing.
Diet Coke (for women) and Coke Zero (for me) are a great example.

*Yes - I have an MBA from UNC Chapel Hill. Please flame as necessary. :)

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city41
When people were asked to drive the latest Ford Fiesta, Toyota Yaris,
Chevrolet Cobalt and BMW 5-series, they all seemed rather comparable, except
the BMW for some reason...

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languagehacker
They could have at least compared a microbrew lager to the others. It's
seriously comparing an orange to five apples.

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newmediaclay
There is not even close to enough information in this post to take it
seriously. How big was the sample? Who were these taters? Are they even beer
drinkers? Etc., etc.

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henning
"As it turns out, most god-awful piss beers are pretty much the same"

ftfy

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mdg
Conversely, I would imagine this is why people hate on Bing. They associate it
with Microsoft, an 'evil empire', and must figure it is shit search (or
whatever negative connotation they have with the company).

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alan-crowe
Alcohol is a toxic industrial solvent. People drink it for the mild euphoria
it brings. This is undignified and advertising provides social cover.
Behaviour not much different from glue-sniffing is advertised into being
grown-up, sophisticated, manly, adult, a reward for hard work, the drink of
heroes,...

First the article takes the idea of beer drinkers appreciating different
flavours at face value and then rebuts it. Drinkers are claiming to be
appreciating the various different flavours, but actually they taste they
same. That surprises me. I think it would be easier to spin a taste-bud
romance around alcohol if the flavours were more various.

Second the article suggests that advertising is "creating" the different
tastes and tries to draw a wider lesson for other products that one might
advertise. I disagree with drawing any wider lesson. Alcohol is a unusual
product such that the purpose of advertisements is especially covert. The
advertisers are not fooling the drinkers into tasting differences that are not
there. There are colluding with users in providing a shiny social sheen on a
product that would otherwise offer only a guilty pleasure.

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jrockway
I don't think that's it. I think people will go out and drink regardless of
whether or not there is any advertising. But when it comes to say the name of
the beer you want, that's when advertising comes into play. Deciding which
nearly-identical product to order is hard. So you can reduce the problem to
deciding what ad you liked better, and then your problems are solved.

Also, "alcohol is a toxic industrial solvent." So is water.

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alan-crowe
Your reply dodges the point raised by the article. They do a taste test and
the beers have different flavours. Then they repeart the taste test blind and
the beers taste the same. The article suggests that the taste comes from the
advertising. I suggest that it wasn't about taste to begin with. Why do you
think that stripping the labels off the bottles made the flavour go away?

~~~
jrockway
No, we're saying the same thing. Brand => perception => flavor. Brand =>
perception => willingness to buy it in front of your friends.

The mind works in interesting ways.

