Brewers Flex Marketing Muscles

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I'll confess I'm at something of a loss to decide how seriously to take news releases like the one Anheuser-Busch (NYSE: BUD) issued late last week, in which the leading brewer trumpeted victory over rival Adolph Coors (NYSE: RKY) following the latter's agreement to stop airing commercials that, the former said, made "unsubstantiated claims about consumers' taste preferences."

The announcement comes shortly after several television networks stopped showing ads that, interestingly enough, also took potshots at Anheuser-Busch's Bud Light beer. Bud Light is the leader in the light segment, which has seen renewed growth among beer-loving calorie counters and led to new products including Coors' Aspen Edge and Anheuser-Busch's Michelob Ultra.

The comments out of Anheuser-Busch with regard to these advertisements deal largely with talk of the battle to maintain something called "truth in advertising," but what's probably more notable is the market environment that these tempests in a beer bottle illustrate.

Lots of consumer brands engage in comparative advertising -- think of efforts you've seen to establish various brands of soda pop, fast-food French fries, and automobiles as America's choice over other well-known options -- but the beer companies are perhaps the most likely to not only mention but also even show people enjoying (or, more likely, attempting to enjoy) the competitor's product. That's certainly not what I'd consider a traditional long-term brand-building strategy.

I may be wrong here, but I can't remember any other industry operating advertising campaigns that actually play off each other's commercials in a kind of Madison Avenue call-and-response game -- and it really does seem like a game sometimes -- to the degree that the brewers do. (If you can think of examples, let me know.)

It's an indication that the ads (and the "uproar" over them) reflect a determination to generate whatever buzz is needed to maintain top-of-mind consumer awareness in a back-and-forth battle for tiny bits of market share calculated weekly or perhaps even daily -- gains that dissipate as quickly as they materialize. In a market as mature as this one, there aren't many other levers for juicing sales short of buying out the competition.

Fool contributor Dave Marino-Nachison doesn't own any of the companies in this story.