What do you picture when you hear the word hipster?
They are probably wearing a tight jeans,
a flannel, beanie,, black-framed glasses,
maybe a beard, and of course the stereotypical hipster is holding a can of PBR.
But wait. Why PBR?
There is no real definition of a contemporary hipster,
but some generally agreed upon descriptive terms
include anti-mainstream and anti-consumerism.
Come on. Got like that hanging on here. It's over.
In his 2011 book Hipster Mattic,
author Matt Granfield summed up hipster culture by writing "Above all,
they wanted to be recognized for being different – to diverge
from the mainstream and carve a cultural niche all for themselves."
This is the story of how PBR tapped into the hipster consumer.
The Pabst Blue Ribbon Ken is a classic.
It's decorated with clean red lines, ornate font,
and artistic hop necklace and of course the iconic blue ribbon logo.
It's an odd to Pabst early practice of tying
ribbons on each bottle to symbolize its award winning taste.
To this day you'll see America's best in the 1893 printed on every can.
Sales peaked in 1977 at 18 million barrels.
To put that into perspective,
the number one brand of Budweiser sold 26 million barrels in 1976.
But by the turn of the century,
PBR was far from their glory days.
In 2001 they recorded selling under one million barrels.
The company really at that time was very accustomed to declining volume.
There was not a culture of winning.
That's Neil Stewart, when he took the job as
senior brands manager of Pabst Blue Ribbon in 2000,
he was charged with reversing a 20 year sales decline.
When I started the company was very focused on the consumer
that you would've just kind of thought wasn't too cheap beer which was like retirees,
older guys that are spending their days out on a fishing boat.
Stewart not only looked at PBR marketing,
but the state of the beer industry.
Back then a lot of premium brands were still
using girls in bikinis for their advertising.
A lot of larger brands were using cheap humor for their advertising.
PBR is target demographic.
Wasn't buying the product and
the younger generations were not buying into the advertising,
but there was one place where Pabst was selling, Portland Oregon.
Our distributor in Portland Oregon was like yeah this Brand's on
fire literally there was a time probably in 2001 or 2002,
where their volume was doubling every month.
Stewart flew out to see why.
What I found was kind of validated what we thought was
the consumer who was really rejecting traditional marketing tactics,
and they had really adopted as their brand.
But it was a variety of different subcultures.
So it was people that were into rockabilly.
It was people that were into Hindi rock.
It was bike messengers.
It was people that were into cheddar rallies.
While walking bar to bar talking to these new PBR drinkers,
Stewart noticed they liked it for three reasons.
One, it was retro.
Two,it was cheap.
Three, it wasn't flashy.
Despite its blue ribbon the taste probably wasn't a reason.
Beer Advocate dotcom scores Pabst a lowly 2.93 out of five points.
Stewart left Portland with his new target consumer, anti-corporate,
anti-marketing and nostalgia loving members of
subcultures living in specific urban centers.
He didn't know it at the time,
but his target consumer was the hipster.
Pabst then implemented a geographic strategy.
It worked in Portland.
So next up was Seattle,
San Francisco, and Denver.
In each city the strategy was very grassroots.
Instead of launching a message you hope will appeal to many people,
you target your efforts to a small group and hope
the group will spread your message to a much larger audience.
Because remember this new consumer did not want to be advertised to.
One time I was in San Francisco and San Francisco
has a lot of bike messengers and we knew that bike messengers love PBR,
so, I kind of looked the part. I went into a bar.
I had a bike messenger bag and it was
four PBR swag and I went on there and I introduced myself to the bartender.
I told him I was like don't tell them who I am.
I gave him my my card.
I was like don't tell my Pabst,
and of course he did exactly what I wanted him to
do which was tell everyone that I worked for Pabst.
For the rest of the night I had tons of people coming up to me and
like introducing themselves, asking for swag.
This grass roots campaign hopped from city to
city purposely targeting small groups of subcultures.
In each city Stewart and his team attended
sub-cultural events like Hindi music festivals,
facial hair clubs, and amateur sports games to
spread a PBR's reach through word of mouth.
The strategy was as grass roots as it gets and
it was more successful than anyone could have predicted.
In 2003, sales rose 15 percent.
Each year that followed saw similar growth,
and in 2009 sales jumped by 25 percent.
Let's remember PBR sold less than 1 million gallons of beer in 2000.
In 2012, PBR sold 92 million gallons.
Businessman Dean Metropoulos bought Pabst Brewing Company for $250 million in 2010.
He then turned quite a profit when he sold it to San Francisco based private equity firm
TSG Consumer Partners for $700 million in 2014.
In recent years PBR growth has plateaued.
The rise of craft beer started stealing more and more of the market share.
But maybe the biggest detriment to PBR success was exactly that their success.
PBR became popular.
PBR became mainstream.
In doing so, they may have turned away their biggest buyer, hipster's.
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