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.

Comments

[Todd]

I'm assuming then that the Natty Ice crowd is some where below the Budweiser crowd?

Or that the Coors Party Ball scene of the early nineties would be run parallel to the current marketing frenzy over the Heineken mini-keg?

If I dressed as a Yeti would I be selling Fosters then?

[Jeff Allen]

If you were selling Foster's you would have to include it with a DVD package of Crocodile Dundee and the Crcodile Hunter. Besides Foster's, all Austrailian exports are croc-related.

[John Watne]

Well stated, sir. I'll have to have a look out for the "Jeeves" beer selling guy next time I want to partake in a cold frosty at the 'dome. I like your analysis of how some of us want to appear like we indulge in a higher form of sophistication, be it beer or housing.

[Tanya Ericksen-Troska]

Well put Jeff.
I would go one step further with that and emphasize not only choose a niche to which you would like to focus your marketing strategies on, but then also adapt the materials you use as well. I've seen on many occasions where someone starts off with a dragnet approach, then fine tunes down to a particular defined area or group of like-minded people, and focuses their marketing to that area, but fail to update the marketing materials to coincide with this defined niche. I certainly wouldn't run the same magnitude of ad, run the ads in the same forum, or create a home-style sheet reflective of an uptown condo to just then use these same formats for an acreage home in Corcoran, yet I've seen it done over and over again. With that said, it goes even a little deeper than that. It comes down to a business management strategy that not only real estate agents fall short on, but they seem to be notorious for, and that is: taking your marketing & advertising budgets and applying them as equal terms to every circumstance across the board, and expecting similar results for each. When you say it out loud, it seems ridiculous to think that I would spend the same amount of resources on a 1970's townhome in Hopkins as I would on a completely renovated 1920's two-story Tudor in south Minneapolis, and you would even tell yourself... "No way", but it happens time and time again. So… in a challenging market with equally challenging economic times, if you want your business to thrive then you not only have to define your niche market... but redefine how you run your business reflective of that niche market.

[Jeff Allen]

Excellent thoughts, Tanya.

What's your beef with Hopkins though? :)

-- Hopkins High School, Class of 2000