ON THE AVENUES: 800-lb “gorilla” marketing.

ON THE AVENUES: 800-lb “gorilla” marketing.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Twitter Patter

@will_smith: “Grudges are a waste of perfect happiness.”

@JayBilas: “What if grudges make you perfectly happy?”

In April, the New Albanian Brewing Company completed a project in conjunction with two undergraduate marketing classes at IU Southeast. That’s my alma mater, where I never took a single business (or mathematics) class in route to a philosophy degree. I managed to avoid science save for a solitary biology class, although that’s another story.

The marketing project was instructional, and also loads of fun, especially given that I’ve always enjoyed cultivating a reputation as the Antichrist of “business education as usual.” Suffice to say that this is overblown; still, the cooperative venture between NABC and the pedagogues came as somewhat of a surprise to some observers.

It shouldn’t have. While I’ve enjoyed several instances of good-natured jousting with the School of Business faculty over various ideas and concepts, I’ve always been interested in how their students, most of them half my age, might react to the assignment of understanding a business like ours, and then rebranding NABC as a brewing entity first and foremost, and a brewpub/restaurant (with two locations) second. In short, how are we to be better known as a brewery?

Now a measure of youth has been served (not literally), at least insofar as this sampling is concerned, and as expected, the results were all over the map. All the groups did a fine job, while some did better than other. Even those groups that were less than cohesive in an overall sense had useful nuggets of solid ideas to offer NABC.

There were tags and phrases, organizational suggestions, web site revisions, practical steps to clarify the message, and many more. I deeply appreciate the efforts of all participants, and hope to do something like it again, some day in the future. However, I must confess to being surprised by one consistent aspect of all the presentations, which might be described as a general reluctance to boldly step outside the box and embrace unconventional, guerrilla marketing tactics.

Perhaps this was a reflection of inexperience, or requirements of the curriculum and what information they’d previously assimilated, but knowing their instructor Mike Breazeale’s guerrilla proclivities, I’m inclined to doubt it. To me, it’s a universal condition, seeing as children are raised to conform to the pre-conceived, not extend perimeters.

For instance, even in this fragmented age, there was a shared assumption among almost 60 students as to the inevitability of television, radio and billboards as prime means of informational conveyance – but not newspapers. As I’d guessed going in, there was nary a mention of the word “newspaper,” apart from references to Louisville Eccentric Observer and whatever ephemeral shards remain of the Courier-Journal’s late and unlamented Velocity.

Curiously, there was much less mention of social media than I’d expected. Is it so ubiquitous to young people nowadays that it isn’t even necessary to bring it up?

---

By the end of the venture, I’d started thinking about the nature of human conformity.

I’m obviously no sociologist – although sometimes I play one on the blog – and yet I’m struck by the extent of default acceptance of conformity in everyday life. It’s the path of least resistance, and seemingly we’re in no position, or lack the interpretive tools, to step back from our unquestioned assumptions and subject them to something approximating analysis.

There is an insinuation to the effect that as one goes forward, there’ll be compliance with the norms far more often than not. Perhaps this is true because in the sense of large, humanity-wide samplings, norms gradually came into being precisely because they address the temperaments of the species, and often because whether sensible or not, the norms have become codified, and the weight of social and legal systems reinforces them.

For many, it’s entirely understandable that blending into the mass is the simplest way to live. Trust me: It takes quite a lot of energy to challenge the mainstream, even in small ways such as those I try to extol, and to be truly different. For instance, it’s both funny and sad to note the reaction when you begin describing an urban landscape that isn’t auto-centric. Before the first paragraph is through, listeners begin nestling their car keys.

---

And so it happened that about the very same time the IUS marketing class project was completed, I received an e-mail from Cavalier Distributing, NABC’s statewide wholesale distributor in Indiana, to the effect that the infamous Central Indiana package store chain known as Big Red Liquors had asked Cavalier about stocking our 22-oz bomber bottles.

I objected, and vehemently.

Since 2009, when New Albanian Brewing Company first began distributing our beer statewide in Indiana, we have made absolutely no effort to sell anything to Big Red Liquors. Cavalier has followed suit -- at our request. From the start, I made it clear that we wanted nothing to do with them. The reason for this is that NABC has no desire to be partnered, whether directly or ephemerally – neither in a mercantile sense nor metaphorically in any sense – with Big Red. We have a history, and it is an unpleasant one. I hold few grudges. This is one of them, and Jay Bilas is right: It makes me perfectly happy.

I understand that some will find it incredible that I’d intentionally deny my own company the opportunity to sell beer through such a large retailer. However, to me, it isn’t always about money. I directed a letter to Big Red’s president asking his company to cease and desist from purchasing NABC beers – to please just leave us alone – until the Big Red employee with whom I cannot co-exist either apologizes to me for the slight that led to the grudge, or is no longer employed by the company.

Isn’t that reasonable? Isn’t life too short for one to be compelled to fluff entities that are revolting? I could not care less if refusing to conform to expectations of the buyer-seller relationship makes me a pariah, because for each potential customer who’s into abject bondage, another appreciates the liberating connotations of telling Big Red to stuff it.

It is so very difficult to convey the value of taking the road less traveled. Still, I recommend the diversion.