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• Can professional service recruitment marketers learn a thing or two from Pabst Blue Ribbon?

  By Joe Walsh

  Posted on February 28, 2011 at 12:34 pm

  

  A few months back at an informal dinner with a handful of other couples here in Portland, Maine, I ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon.  One tablemate, a long-time Mainer with a wry sense of humor and tallboy Schlitz in front of him, half-kiddingly asked: “Why are you drinking that yuppie beer?”

  Who first said that irony is so ironic?
  Pabst has certainly come a long way from a nearly defunct local-tavern brand to sub-culture favorite and now a trendy choice across the county (I literally ran into a large display of PBR cans recently at the Wholefoods on P Street in downtown D.C.).  The brand certainly has enjoyed exponential sales growth that proves its broader acceptance, but the marketing road from milltown to mainstream was certainly unusual.

  While the mega-budget, major brands yearned for attention in every conceivable advertising medium from Superbowl ads to superhighway billboards, “PBR concentrated on enhancing their relationships with the sub-cultures that were driving the sales of PBR.” According to the experts, “the brand appealed to the twenty-something section of the consumers who were distrustful of any kind of marketing communication and did not want to be manipulated by advertising campaigns.”

  So how does this link to your recruitment marketing efforts? For starters you are once again targeting those same 20-somethings as hiring trends begin to reverse. In your outreach efforts, consider off-beat “buzz creation” tactics like those employed by PBR or others that speak to a generation of potential hires who are as marketing savvy as they are marketing weary.

  Cheers.

  Tags:

  Marketing, Online Communications, Professional Services, Recruiting 

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  Comment from Jacklynn November 6, 2011 at 8:17 pm

  I was so confused about what to buy, but this makes it undesrtadanlbe.

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