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A friend at the door with a six-pack is always welcome, especially when the six-pack comes from an obscure micro-brewery.
That way, you're not just two middle-aged small-town guys swilling beer while plotting more patriarchal oppression of marginalized populations. That is an insensitive juvenile pastime and an affront to progressive thinkers, and you won't find me encouraging it.
Instead, you are connoisseurs who support the bold risk-taking quality-driven entrepreneurs who spearheaded the renaissance of diversity in American beer.
The Red Dog that Kirby Perschbacher brought by on that recent winter night was good enough, and while we could still read fine print, we squinted at the label to see who made the stuff -- doubtless some boutique brewery in Crested Butte, Magdalena or Helena. But it came from Miller, the same folks who brought us Lite and like abominations that replaced malt with marketing.
Why would Miller, which spends millions on ads and sports sponsorships to establish national brand identities, go to the trouble of producing a beer packaged like something from a ma-and-pa shop down the street?
The obvious answer is that this ruse works. They suckered us. We wanted to support the little guys with our beer purchases, but, thanks to that deceptive label, our money went to the $60 billion Philip Morris Corp.
Nor is this the only instance. The same Philip Morris is so embarrassed by its new brand of cigarettes -- supposedly from down-home North Carolina farmer Dave -- that the corporate name appears nowhere on the product, and retailers are told not to display Dave near his corporate cousins from Marlboro country.
General Motors is embarrassed by its Saturn cars, too.
Saturn may be a wholly owned subsidiary, but it's a
different kind of car from a different kind of
company,
each Saturn custom assembled for a sheriff in
Nebraska or a dance teacher in Alaska.
This tendency to disguise product origins even infests
the publishing industry. In many cities, there are
successful alternative
newspapers (Just how
alternative
is open to question. I once inquired
about a position at a start-up and asked what sort of paper
they wanted. Standard alternative
was the reply,
which sounded as oxymoronic as journalistic ethics
or political principles.
).
Some of these alternative
papers -- even though
they appear quite hip with their yupscale guides to the 10
best blues bars where readers are unlikely to meet black
people -- were established and operated by the mainstream
monopoly paper in town, a fact hidden from readers and
advertisers.
Further exploration would doubtless reveal many more examples of big companies trying to look like small companies, and there's got to be more to this than merely hoodwinking a few beer drinkers.
This down-home marketing may go back to ice cream. The super-premium brand used to be Haagen-Dazs -- made in New Jersey, but packaged to make you think of Scandinavia. That was trendy 15 years ago when America loved imports.
Along came Ben & Jerry, who were stuck for a marketing gimmick and hit upon the more-or-less truthful image (at the time, anyway) of two Vermont guys who loved their product.
That hustle worked so well that bigger enterprises, like Gallo Wineries, tried it. Gallo's two geezers sold wine coolers by the tank car, and pretty soon, leading-edge Americans avoided stuff that appeared to come from big companies.
That's odd, because a big company has more resources and should be able to do a better job.
But these days, it does seem foolish to trust big companies. On those happy occasions when we could afford new appliances, rather than search the classifieds and yard sales for another $75 washing machine that might last another year before we had to repeat the dreary cycle, we always bought Kenmore appliances from Sears.
Sears was everywhere; it always had been and always would be. Thus parts and service would always be available, and the warranty had meaning.
Sounded like good sense to me, but then Sears announced that it would no longer serve rural America with catalog stores. Sears didn't want us; we weren't worth the trouble.
So why buy from a big company when it's just as likely, perhaps even more likely, to betray its costumers as some no-name appliance store down the street? The apparent advantages of a major brand can evaporate overnight in this age of mergers, takeovers, consolidations and down-sizing.
Mere customers appear nowhere in these reckonings, and many of us would prefer to take our trade to some place where we matter.
Thus the rising popularity of down-home enterprises. They need us, whereas the big guys seem more concerned with debt ratios and finding ways to elevate the CEO's miserly pay of $9.8 million a year.
That, and the marketing departments of those big companies are busy trying to find ways to make us think that they're really small companies. Instead of taking honest pride in who they are and what they do, they pretend to be something else. Too bad they named it Red Dog instead of Miller Red Wolf, with a sheep on the label.
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