InBev USA

101 Merritt 7
Norwalk, Connecticut 06856-5075
USA
Telephone: (203) 750-6600
Fax: (203) 750-6699
Web site: www.inbev.com

GRAB A ROCK CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

NOTE: Also see essay for Labatt USA.

After years of outperforming other beers in its category, the Latrobe Brewing Company's Rolling Rock, then owned by Labatt USA (a division of Belgium's Interbrew that became known as InBev USA following the parent company's 2004 merger with AmBev), set out in 2002 to reverse the previous year's sales decline. Rolling Rock's recipe for success had included a positioning based on the brand's perceived authenticity and quirkiness as well as a push to capture the loyalty of entry-age drinkers. Building on the success of a rock-music festival called the Rolling Rock Town Fair in the brewery's hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, but moving away from its previous emphasis on radio advertising, Labatt USA charged agency McCann-Erickson of New York to craft a national TV campaign. The result was "Grab a Rock."

"Grab a Rock," a four-commercial campaign that was part of the $25 million spent annually to promote Rolling Rock in North America, focused on peculiarities of male behavior and bonding codes and targeted men aged 21 to 34. Within this target, however, Labatt USA further honed its message by aiming two spots at the younger subset of the larger group and two spots at the older subset. The campaign began in January 2002 and was supported by a promotional partnership with ESPN. In addition to sports-programming placements, airtime was purchased on a variety of other cable networks during male-oriented shows.

The campaign was credited with helping to arrest the previous year's sales slide and with contributing to a 2 percent gain in Rolling Rock sales for 2002. The success of the first four spots led Labatt USA to commission four more for 2003. The 2004 merger between parent company Interbrew (which owned such best-selling European brands as Stella Artois, Bass, and Beck's) and Brazil's AmBev (maker of the world's third-most-popular beer, Latin America's Skol) made Rolling Rock's new ultimate parent the largest beer producer in the world.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Rolling Rock brand was introduced in 1939 by Latrobe Brewing, an entity created by five brothers from the Tito family of Pittsburgh when, speculating that President Roosevelt would repeal Prohibition a year before he actually did, they purchased what had been the Loyalhanna Brewing Co. in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Rolling Rock, with its distinctive green bottle featuring painted-on horse imagery and the mysterious number 33, saw consistent sales gains in the 1960s and sold 720,000 barrels in 1974 before beginning a decade-long decline. Throughout this time, however, the Tito family maintained and renovated their brewery, and the company survived even as many local breweries nationwide went out of business. In 1985 a Japanese beverage manufacturer called Sundor bought Latrobe Brewing and then sold the company at a profit to Labatt USA in 1987.

Labatt USA continued to invest heavily in production and bottling capability, but it also added a key ingredient to the Rolling Rock sales strategy: marketing, a tactic the Tito family had believed unnecessary. In the 1990s the brand relied mostly on radio advertising and continued to build a consumer following, especially in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, and California. Rolling Rock outperformed most players in the so-called superpremium beer category, which included imports and microbrews along with other beers priced higher than the mainstream beer brands, and targeted newly legal drinkers with the first Rolling Rock Town Fair, a rock-music festival near Latrobe, in August 2000. After experiencing record sales that year Rolling Rock saw its position weaken in 2001, with declines of 8 percent in volume. Although the brand supplemented its Town Fair positioning with targeted TV spots featuring aspiring alternative-rock bands, Labatt USA continued to allot the bulk of its Rolling Rock ad spending to radio. As it took the Town Fair concept to 15 other cities in 2001 and embarked on a new round of production-enhancing upgrades at the Latrobe brewery, Rolling Rock faced increasing competition from both imports and micro-brews in the U.S. market. Labatt USA began, with agency McCann-Erickson of New York, planning Rolling Rock's first large-scale national TV effort.

TARGET MARKET

"Grab a Rock," whose four TV spots had in common an emphasis on humorous, peculiarly male codes of behavior, primarily targeted 21- to 34-year-old men, who were far and away the beer industry's most voracious consumers. Within this market, however, the campaign made separate appeals: two of the spots targeted the 21- to 24-year-old subset of the overall target, while the other two were geared toward the older men of the group. Rolling Rock's shift in its advertising emphasis from radio to television made sense, as Rolling Rock director of marketing David Van Wees told Brandweek, because "Our target spends more time watching TV—20 hours a week—than they do listening to radio, reading or going online combined."

The spots aimed at the younger segment featured correspondingly young actors in humorous situations involving bar behavior and pizza eating, while the other two commercials focused on marriage and backyard barbecues, issues more pertinent to those in their late twenties and early thirties. All of the spots featured cameos of the number 33, the mystery number on the Rolling Rock bottle. The tendency of Rolling Rock aficionados to speculate about the meaning of the number was perceived to be a factor in the brand's allure.

COMPETITION

Though Rolling Rock's ultimate parent, Interbrew (later known as InBev) of Belgium—which bought Labatt in 1995—rivaled Anheuser-Busch at the top of beer markets around the world, it did so not through the global marketing of individual brands or images but by tailoring the image of individual beers to individual markets. Thus, while Rolling Rock was Interbrew's top U.S. product, and although Interbrew was an international powerhouse, Rolling Rock was not—and was never intended to be—a top product outside of North America. In the United States Rolling Rock necessarily competed with domestic full-calorie beers such as Budweiser and also with superpremium beers, those priced higher than the mainstream brands.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

The 33 on the Rolling Rock beer bottle had long been seen as a brand asset, helping to inspire loyalty among drinkers. Since the beer's 1939 debut, consumers had obsessively guessed at the 33's meaning and provenance, but Latrobe Brewing and its subsequent corporate owners guarded the secret closely, wisely assuming, according to observers, that the mystery was worth much more to marketers than any explanation could be. Among theories regarding the meaning of the 33 were that it was the racing number for the horse pictured on the bottle, that it referred to the 33 paces separating the brew house from the brewmaster's office, and that it referred to the year 1933, which marked the repeal of Prohibition. Another long-held theory held that the 33 was a typo, a word count of the print generated for the original Rolling Rock label, which erroneously made it onto the proofs for the bottle label and stayed put because the brewery's original owners did not want to waste the bottles that had been made before the error was caught.

Anheuser-Busch, in addition to having an almost 50 percent market share of the country's beer market, had an advertising budget far larger than its nearest competitors. Despite declining sales of Budweiser, the brewer continued to support the "King of Beers" with blockbuster ad campaigns in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most noteworthy campaigns on behalf of Budweiser were the series of commercials featuring frogs whose croaks sounded out the brand's name and a long-running follow-up effort in which the scope of the swamp motif was widened to include talking lizards. Budweiser made what may have been its biggest advertising splash ever, though, with the "Whassup?!" campaign, which focused on four friends' trademark, slang greeting and became a pop-culture phenomenon in 2000.

Heineken, one of Rolling Rock's top competitors in the superpremium category, unveiled its long-running "It's All About the Beer" campaign in 1999. Focusing on universal "beer moments," situations in ordinary life that hinged on the presence of Heineken, the campaign was designed to broaden the brand's U.S. market, especially among young people, by counteracting consumers' elitist associations regarding the classic Dutch brew. At the same time, the tagline and content of the commercials strove to communicate the superiority of the actual product.

Corona Extra, meanwhile, had recently eclipsed Heineken as the United States' top imported beer. The brand's rapid growth in the 1990s was chiefly attributable, in the eyes of many industry watchers, to its marketing strategy. In a succession of campaigns that each built on the same idea—equating Corona with a beach vacation—the brand's marketers established a clear and appealing product image that was distinct from that of all competitors. Between 1995 and 2000 Corona Extra's share of the American import market went from 13.5 percent to 27.3 percent.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Labatt USA declined to release budget figures for "Grab a Rock," Rolling Rock's biggest advertising campaign ever, but senior brand manager Daniel R. Hilbert indicated that the campaign represented a tripling of spending on advertising in support of the brand and yet still accounted for only a fraction of the $25 million spent annually to promote the beer in North America. The campaign built on the youth-oriented marketing push fueled by the Rolling Rock Town Fair concerts and also relied on the perception of authenticity and mystery that supposedly surrounded the brand. New packaging, unveiled almost simultaneously with "Grab a Rock," retained Rolling Rock's traditional horse and steeplechase imagery but highlighted the mystery number 33, which had always appeared on the brand's bottles but the meaning of which had never been disclosed. Likewise, a $14.5 million upgrade of Latrobe Brewing's bottling capacity indicated that Rolling Rock was poised to grow by up to half a million barrels in sales per year.

"Grab a Rock" broke during a January 2002 telecast of a National Football League (NFL) game on ESPN, and the spots continued to appear during that network's SportsCenter sports news show as well as on live coverage of athletic events such as college basketball tournaments and the National Hockey League (NHL) playoffs. "Grab a Rock" spots also appeared on the major networks Fox and CBS and during NFL pregame coverage. Airtime was purchased on cable channels such as TBS, VH1, and the Discovery Channel. Rolling Rock additionally sponsored 33 hours of comedy on the cable channel Comedy Central, a deal that included numerous placements of the "Grab a Rock" commercials.

In one of the campaign's spots aimed at 21- to 24-year-olds, two young men were seen sending hand signals to one another across a crowded nightclub, as one was invited to play pool with an attractive woman and the other was buying Rolling Rocks for the group. A deadpan voice-over provided a humorous translation of the signals. In the other spot aimed at the target market's younger end, the voice-over explained the principle of the "reverse blow," a coping strategy for the young man who had just bitten into an extremely hot piece of pizza. The real solution to the young man's dilemma was, of course, to drink a Rolling Rock.

The commercials that were meant to appeal to the target's older subgroup dealt with more domestic issues but still emphasized male codes of interaction and the ways in which Rolling Rock figured into the lives of men. In "Barbecue," for instance, several critical onlookers ridiculed a host's burger-grilling technique, calling him a "rookie" when he ran out of steak sauce. By pouring Rolling Rock over the sizzling meat, however, he regained his credibility as grill master. Similarly, in "Wedding Rock," set at a wedding reception, the groom took a break from the ceremonial festivities to share a Rolling Rock with his friends. "Did she give you a hall pass, or what?" one friend asked. Another poked fun at him with the question, "What's it like to wear jewelry?" The groom coolly responded, "This old thing?" and opened the beer with his new wedding ring, as the voice-over proclaimed, "And thus the groom maintains his status among the pack."

In April 2002 Rolling Rock supported its airing of the "Grab a Rock" spots on ESPN by entering into a promotional partnership with the network. A SportsCenter basketball-highlights segment titled "Shooting the Rock," which showcased great shooting plays, was introduced. Additionally, "Grab a Rock" commercials were preceded, on SportsCenter, by a Rolling Rock billboard highlighting a consumer scavenger hunt called "Hunt for 33," in which viewers were encouraged to locate the hidden 33s in the TV spots and report their findings on ESPN.com, where they had the chance to win 33 tickets to sporting events of their choice. The promotion lasted for six weeks.

OUTCOME

After "Grab a Rock" was launched in January 2002, brand manager Hilbert told Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, "Sales for February absolutely crushed our plan [for the month] and were well ahead of last year…. Our orders so far for March look to be 8 percent above plan. So we're on a roll, and things are going well." As these trends continued through the year, Labatt USA commissioned four new "Grab a Rock" spots in November 2002. Like the first batch, these commercials, which aired in 2003, focused on male behavior, and especially male-female relations, while prominently showcasing Rolling Rock and its trademark green bottle. A heavy emphasis on sports programming continued, and another promotional partnership with ESPN's SportsCenter ran during the spring of 2003. Sales figures for 2002 showed an overall gain in volume of 2 percent, confirming that the declines of 2001 had been reversed.

The Rolling Rock Town Fair was extended, along with "Grab a Rock," into 2003. In 2004 Interbrew merged with Brazil's AmBev, and the resultant company was called InBev. The merger made InBev the world's leading beer producer, surpassing Anheuser-Busch. Latrobe Brewing's official U.S. owner became known as InBev USA. In 2004 Rolling Rock tried to sidestep new commercial-excising TV technologies (such as TiVo) with an emphasis on product placement in TV shows, including CBS's Ed and NBC's The West Wing.