Lessons in Marketing from the Minnesota Twins
I went to a Twins game the other night. Shocking but true.
It just so happened to be the game where Joe Mauer got two balls thrown at his head, Gardy got ejected, and the Twins blew a three run lead in the late innings. So needless to say, the game could've gone better. The outcome was not the most interesting event of the evening, however.
In the third inning, I got a hankering for an alcoholic beverage of the barley and hops variety. Some people call these "beers." So I scanned the crowd looking for the closest vendor of such a delicious product and found not one, but two, available beer guys. Though they were both selling beer, they were doing it in very different ways.
The first beer hawker looked kinda like this guy on the left. Nothing particularly shocking here. Baseball cap. Polo shirt. Shorts. Clear, plastic cups with domestic draft beer. Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite. The American Quartet of brews. The Everyman of beer vendors -- simple, unassuming, appealing to the masses.
The second beer guy was a completely different story.
Essentially, the second beer guy was Jeeves from www.askjeeves.com. He was wearing a nicely-pressed tuxedo shirt, formal black dress pants, fancy and completely insensible footwear for the miles of steps he would be traversing. All of this was communicating a sense of luxury and grandeur (as much as one can consider ordering a beer at a Twins game to be partaking in luxury).
What sort of beer do you suppose Jeeves was selling? Why "premium" brands, of course. Summit, Heineken, Stella Artois even.
And he wasn't selling them in clear plastic cups, either. These were the genuine, 100% real deal, glass bottles. Most stadiums won't sell glass bottles on account of the very real possibility that their fans will pelt the opposing team with life-threatening beer projectiles. I guess the Twins assume that the type of person who is willing to shell out $7.00 for a "nice" beer is not the type of person who is prone to irrational hooliganism.
The point of all this is that brands mean something. To consumers of mainstream alcohol, their beer man should reflect mainstream America. Alcohol is not a luxury item, but a tool to get you where you need to go, if you catch my drift. Consumers of premium beers make a conscious choice to gravitate towards a more sophisticated product, and therefore expect the overall experience to reflect sophistication. Once again proving that what we buy and how we buy it isn't just about fulfilling a market need, but often a psychological need to define ourselves.
Every market has niches, and understanding them is crucial, even in real estate. Ask yourself whether your current business model and marketing efforts are aimed at a specific kind of customer or whether you're attempting to provide a one-size-fits-all kind of service. Do the people you tend to work with seem like Budweiser people or Stella Artois people? And do you operate accordingly?
All these questions are making me thirsty.


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