your brand narrative

Your brand is a narrative about your product. Just as an author uses words to build his story, brand managers use a series of brand signals to establish the narrative. And, just as there are many genres in literature, there are several genres of “brand stories” in the marketplace, particularly among beers.

The competition among brewers is amazingly fierce. The market for their products isn’t growing; therefore, expanding their share of the pie is the only way to move the needle on sales. This makes their brand story especially important because they must change consumers' tastes for competitor brands — no easy task.

Enter Coors and Corona.

Coors' latest offering to its product differentiation is the temperature bar on the label of their can. It turns blue when the beer is cold. Asinine? There isn’t a better definition. But, wait! Coors recently introduced a second bar, indicating whether beer has gone from “cold,” to “super cold.” (It was easy-pickings for Breckenridge Brewery.)

Meanwhile, Corona Extra’s “Find Your Beach” campaign is running strong. In these spots, Corona drinkers are shown to be on a beach, mentally, no matter where they are. For example, one of the latest spots features a man drinking a Corona on a beach when a Stewardess pushes a cart up to his chair. The shot switches to the man sitting on a plane. He found his beach, a mile above the earth.

One brand wrote a children’s novel. The other wrote War and Peace.

Cramer-Krasselt, who is Corona's agency of record, wrote that the “Find Your Beach” campaign is built for “further evolving the [Corona] brand's iconic campaign to extend the ‘Corona Beach’ from a physical place to a state of mind.” "What we want 'Find Your Beach' to do is literally show that the beach is where you make it," said Marshall Ross, executive vice president/chief creative officer, Cramer-Krasselt.

On the other hand, Coors’ “Bar Exam” spots pushes consumers to consider if drinking the beer will make them dumber.

When writing a story for your brand, consider what you hope to accomplish when the story is finished. It’s important that you create brand narratives that buttress what you want consumers to feel about your product.

The example to follow in this case is Corona. Instead of opting for a cheap trick, which has become the latest trend among the Big Three (Bud Light’s “write-on label,” Coors’ temperature bar, and Miller Lite’s vortex bottleneck), Corona chose to create a narrative that moved the souls of consumers and reinforced the power of escapism that has become a centerpiece of the brand.