Dive Brief:
- Ballantine, a beer brand that was killed off when sales lagged in the 1970s, will return to store shelves in September.
- Pabst Brewing Co. is marketing the India pale ale to hipsters, who embraced the low-cost Pabst Blue Ribbon brand. But the brewer thinks the ale may also appeal to fans of craft brews and to everyday consumers.
- Ballantine won't be made in its home town of Newark, NJ, but is instead being brewed in Minnesota through a deal with Cold Spring Brewing, which makes Third Street Brewhouse beers and leases its facility to other brewers.
Dive Insight:
Pabst Brewing has seen tremendous success with the revival of Pabst Blue Ribbon. And thus it's tempting to believe that the brewer has some insight on millenials that the company can use again and again.
But the remarkable thing about the rise of PBR was that it had the appearance of being spontaneous ... driven by cost-conscious young people looking to do things differently from the generation or two before it, rather than by the deliberate plans of a company that understood people who rode skateboards, played ukuleles, and wore mutton-chop sideburns. In the rise of PBR, Pabst wisely stayed in the background.
Pulling off such a stealth campaign twice would be nearly impossible. And this time around Pabst doesn't seem interested in even attempting to do so. Sending out press releases and talking openly about marketing, as Pabst is doing with the Ballantine revival, would seem to be a distinctly different approach.