The billion-dollar brands spending big to go from stale to chic
Iconic brands including Coors and Jello-O are revitalising themselves to win over new audiences as consumer tastes change.
Throughout the past 150 years, Coors has been many things: beloved beer brand of the American West; survivor of Prohibition; aluminium can innovator; boycott target and, later, beneficiary; household name and on the receiving end of more than a few jokes.
Today, the brand is changing shape again as it confronts a new reality in its home market: US consumers are drinking less beer.
In a landscape replete with hard seltzers, spirits and all flavours of booze-free fizzy waters, more people are looking to alternative beverages. The shift has been underway for several years, and in 2022, US spirit sales surpassed beer sales for the first time ever.
Molson Coors, the multinational company behind Coors, Miller, Blue Moon, Keystone Light and dozens of other popular beer brands, recorded a 5% or 2.2 million-barrel decline in US volume last year, according to data from the Boulder-based Brewers Association, first reported by Axios.
Executives have acknowledged consumers' changing "lifestyle choices" and the "softness in the beer industry" on earnings calls. Yet they've also painted a characteristically optimistic picture of the road ahead. This is partly because the company has prepared for these transformations: its biggest brands are today on an upward trajectory in sales and market share, and it has steered its product line-up towards growing categories like whiskey and energy drinks in recent years.
To keep up with the pace of culture, brands are in a constant state of reinvention, from changes as subtle as a tweaked typeface, to wholesale overhauls of their portfolios and positionings. Rebrands can help a cereal box stand out on a shelf, make an insurance company's logo look cleaner on a phone screen, draw attention to the star ingredient in a new shampoo or convey a tech conglomerate's expanded scope.
“If they’re done right, they’re barely perceptible to the audience. Everyday consumers just feel more resonance and emotional connection and indispensability from the brand.”
Appetite for evolution
Coming out of the pandemic, Gabor says she is seeing a wave of companies eager to revitalise their brands to adapt to the seismic changes in consumers' lifestyles, habits and priorities.
Coors, after all, is hardly the only brand that's facing a challenging market and fresh competition. Bankrupt businesses including retailers Bed, Bath & Beyond and JCPenney are getting expensive revamps under new ownership; toy company Mattel is blanketing pop culture in all things Barbie to give the decades-old doll a new lease on life; and companies including software provider Zoom and pharmaceutical company Pfizer have rolled out new logos to draw attention to their investments in accessibility and biopharma innovation, respectively.
Read the full BBC Worklife article here.