Years ago my old partner Glenmore Trenear-Harvey told me a
heart-rending tale about some poor bloke who was bitten on the end of
his whanger by a tiger snake. A couple of decades later it was cleverly
bowdlerised to help introduce Castlemaine XXXX in this country.
You will recall that Foster’s had already been launched using the same
ploy; it is Australian and they make good beer in Oz. Foster’s used Paul
Hogan playing the ultimate Australian - for which he is well-equipped
after 50 years’ practice - while Castlemaine recycled classic jokes like
the tiger snake one.
This was a clever idea. Australians can be wonderfully funny, especially
about our performance in sundry competitive sports, concerning which my
Sydney associate wittily reminds me at depressingly frequent
intervals.
But trying to be more Aussie than the next bloke is a perilously slim
basis upon which to build your marketing strategy, which may be why
Castlemaine, being second into the field, has never done as well as it
might. Even Foster’s, deprived of Mr Hogan, is now faltering.
In an idle moment lately I was thumbing through old issues of Marketing,
which can be instructive since you often see foreshadowed therein the
wreck of great enterprises - or in this case follies. Last August,
Castlemaine announced they were about to spend the largest sum of money
in one night in British advertising history. They were buying nine slots
for pounds 1m to ’revamp the Aussie lager’s image’.
The ads would ’ditch the rough and ready hero’ of ’Australians wouldn’t
give a XXXX’, which was ’not the right image for the 90s’. He had
’metamorphosed into a new man’ leaving work, arriving at a bar and
meeting his girlfriend.
His motorbike was swapped for a cycle, his girlfriend for a burly
transvestite and his body replaced by a fly. Explaining this silliness
away, some naive soul at Carlsberg-Tetley said: ’This launch event is
intended to make the brand more relevant to consumers.’ Macho man
becomes fashion designer?
I don’t think so.
A few days in and around Sydney will quickly show that Australia,
transvestism and flies are no strangers, but it’s a little hard to see
what they have to do with beer. No doubt the agency’s profits - Saatchi
& Saatchi in this case - were greatly uplifted; and whoever sold the
idea to the gullible client deserved a fat bonus. But anyone who thought
this foolish extravaganza could really change the way customers viewed
any product is in dire need of a frontal lobotomy; especially when you
consider that the proposed new image was exactly opposite to the
original.
’The new look is part of a turnaround of C-T’s brands which started with
Carlsberg and will include Tetley’s bitter,’ said the report
trustingly.
Really? A year later, Carlsberg-Tetley continues to flounder, Tetley’s
is in trouble and Castlemaine has been classified as a secondary
brand.
Entirely predictable, and richly deserved.
Drayton Bird runs the Drayton Bird Partnership.
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