What's in a Name?

I noted with interest this week that Pabst Brewing Company is re-introducing the classic "Schlitz" brand of beer to the public. I can remember back in the 1970s when Schlitz was a top-selling beer, complete with its own advertising jingle, television commercials, print ads, and gallons of sales all over the U.S. Then the company started tinkering with the formula, presumably to improve the beer's taste and increase market share. This effort backfired on the brewing company, Schlitz sales plummeted, and within a few years the produce was relegated to the scrap heap of history.

Now, I don't drink beer, and if I did I suspect I wouldn't drink Schlitz beer; beer drinkers of my acquaintance rarely had anything nice to say about the product when it was available. But I find the re-introduction of an extinct product line to be an interesting strategic approach to gaining market share, and therefore within the scope of this blog...

Basically, this whole strategy turns on the concept of brand identity, and in particular, of a brand existing separately from the products that carry it. If I tell you that a new product is made by Sony, for example, you will expect it to be an extremely high-quality example of whatever it is, or possibly a brand-new design or technology altogether; it may or may not have some sleek, ultra-modern design elements and it will almost certainly be overpriced. This is what the Sony brand name has come to mean to the consumer. Any given Sony product might completely fail to conform to these beliefs; in fact, the company has almost certainly produced inferior products from time to time, but they have not done so often enough to affect the general perception of the brand name. The consuming public continues to believe in the quality (and qualities) of a Sony.

The process of establishing a specific set of values as the ones associated with a specific company or product name is called Branding, and companies invest huge amounts of time and money in both establishing and defending their brand names. You've probably observed examples of both activities, such as focus groups and product give-aways (to develop stronger brand awareness) and lawsuits seeking to have movies or television shows stop portraying a given product in a bad light. In many ways, a brand name can take on a "life" or identity of its own, just as a corporation does. Certainly, that product's "good name" has a value, and companies have an interest in increasing (and protecting) that value.

In the case of a beer, a brand name that the consumer associates with something positive (e.g. winning athletes, social acceptance or romantic success) will increase the product's appeal; a beer that consumers associate with "craft-brewing" or unusually good taste will be perceived as tasting better even if it doesn't. Resurrecting a beer brand that died off decades ago after people started to complain that it didn't taste good anymore is a much more vague approach. It's possible that the beer-drinking public includes people who have fond memories of drinking Schlitz in the 1970s and will want to again. It's also possible that the name and/or tie-in marketing will work again in 2008 the way they did in 1978. But if neither of these things happen, it's also possible that the brand will die off a second time...