Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [38]
Miraculously, Miller managed to introduce this low-calorie beer without tarnishing its macho image. The ads, featuring leading sports figures and the strap-line ‘everything you always wanted in a beer – and less’, were very successful, and by 1983 Miller Lite was second only to Budweiser in the beer rankings.
Less miraculously, it soon became apparent that the rising popularity of Miller Lite was offset by the declining popularity of High Life. While the introduction of the light beer in 1974 had led to increased overall sales in the short term, in the long term it was costing the company its original brand. Having peaked in 1979 with sales of over 20 million barrels, High Life was now in terminal decline.
What Miller should have learnt from this experience was that the success of one Miller brand was at the cost of another. As marketing expert Jack Trout famously put it, ‘in the mind, it’s one idea to a brand.’ But Miller continued to extend its brand in further directions, and with similar results. In 1986, the company launched a cold-filtered beer called Miller Genuine Draft. Again, the beer was a success. Again, the other Miller brands suffered. By 1991, sales of Miller Lite were starting to decline.
The incentive to launch new brands was still strong, though. After all, every new Miller beer which had emerged on the market increased sales for the company in the short term. And short-term trends were always going to be easier to spot than those which happen slowly, over years and decades.
Rather than create completely new brands, the company kept on launching sub-brands under the Miller name. So whereas their 1970s counterparts were only offered Miller High Life, Miller drinkers in the 1990s had considerably more choice. Walking into a bar or supermarket, they not only had to choose between Miller, Coors and Budweiser, but between various brands within the Miller range itself.
There was still Miller High Life (hanging on by a thread) and Miller Lite, but also Miller Lite Ice, Miller High Life Lite, Miller Genuine Draft, Miller Genuine Draft Lite, Miller Reserve, Miller Reserve Lite, Miller Reserve Amber Ale and the very short-lived Miller Clear. The trouble was not so much that there were too many Miller brands (although that was indeed a problem) but that they were variations of each other, rather than a variation of one core brand. (Incidentally, this theory explains why Diet Coke succeeded where New Coke failed. Whereas the former had supplemented the original brand, the latter had eradicated it completely.)
In 1996 Miller decided to address this situation, adding yet another brand to the mix, Miller Regular. The company had looked at the success of its rivals’ regular beers and wanted a piece of the action. In other words, they wanted a beer which would come to represent everything Miller stood for, which by that point was rather a lot.
The only problem was that with so many Miller brands already out there, launching another one (even with a US $50 million marketing budget) was always going to be a challenge, especially when it had such an unassuming name. With an apparently limitless array of Millers to choose from, most people assumed that Miller Regular had always been there. As a result, the brand failed to make an impact and Miller eventually decided to withdraw it altogether.
The problem of identity, however, still remained. Whereas drinkers could go into a bar and say to the bartender, ‘I’ll have a Budweiser,’ causing little confusion, if they said, ‘I’ll have a Miller,’ the bartender would inevitably ask, ‘Which Miller?’
As Jack Trout wrote in his excellent and influential book, The New Positioning, ‘the more variations you attach