In order to have the best customers, educate them through your marketing.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Consistently tell the world what you offer, why you offer it and how it will benefit them.
In the early 1920’s, there were about ten different brewing companies aggressively competing for the same market. Schlitz wasn’t doing very well and was number eight in the marketplace.
All the breweries advertised the same basic message: “Our Beer is Pure.” They didn’t explain to the beer drinkers what pure really meant. They just kept saying, “pure, pure, pure.”
Schlitz hired a marketing consultant in hopes of improving sales. The marketing consultant was taken on a tour of the brewery and was told how Schlitz brewed their beer. He was very impressed with what he learned.
The Schlitz facilities were right on Lake Michigan and the lake water back in the twenties was very clean.
However, even though they were right on the lake, they drilled two five-thousand-foot artesian wells because they had to go deep enough to find the right combination of water and mineral content to make the best beer possible.
They explained how they labored thru 1,623 separate experiments over five years to identify and develop the finest mother yeast cell that could produce the richest taste and flavor.
They showed the consultant how they went through a process of distillation of the water before they used it to brew the beer. It was heated to five thousand degrees Fahrenheit and then cooled down and condensed – and they did that not once but three times to make sure it was absolutely purified.
They described the bottling process where they steamed each bottle at temperatures of sixteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit to kill all bacteria and germs so they would not possibly contaminate the taste of their beer.
Then they explained that they had every batch tasted to make certain it was pure and rich before they would ever bottle it and send it out the door.
The consultant was overwhelmed by this brewing process. He told Schlitz management that they should tell consumers about the extraordinary measures they took to brew their beer. Schlitz management said, “Why would we do that? All breweries do the same thing we do.”
But the marketing consultant understood the concept of preemptive marketing. “But no one in your industry explains it,” he answered. “The first person who tells the story and explains how, and the reasons why, you do something, will gain distinction and preeminence in the marketplace from then on.”
Schlitz was the first and only company that ever told the story about how their beer was made. That became their unique selling proposition (USP).
The word they used was Krausening…all the breweries did it, but only Schlitz told the public.
Within six months Schlitz moved from number eight in the market to number one.
This story was shared by one of my marketing mentors, Jay Abraham