Molson Coors‘ new marketing chief helped revitalize Molson Canadian’s marketing strategy after years of stagnation. Following a recent restructuring of the company’s marketing efforts, Scott Cooper is hoping to do the same for Coors Light.
Scott Cooper
“It’s a big brand. It’s in a bunch of demographics. [But] I think it succumbs to what a lot of big brands do,” said Cooper, Molson Coors’ recently appointed chief commercial officer, in a conversation with Marketing.
“You’re relevant to so many different demographics and consumers that you worry about pissing anyone off, and then you become less sharp in the work that got the brand to where it was,” he said.
Cooper, Molson’s former chief of strategy and business transformation, replaced Peter Nowlan in late April, after Nowland left the company for a job as chief brand and marketing officer at Tim Horton’s.
At the time, a spokesperson for Molson Coors told Marketing that Cooper “effectively created a platform for the growth we are seeing for Molson Canadian as a brand” – and he plans to use lessons from that growth in tackling Molson’s other brands.
Looking back, Cooper says that one of the key lessons he took away from his work on the Canadian brand was learning from Canadian’s recent troubled past.
“The brand had been in decline for about 10 years,” he said of the time he joined the company in 2008. “I was the ninth VP [of marketing] in 10 years on the business. That’s a lot of churn.”
“Because there had been so much turnover on the brand, we lost the core idea of what the brand stood for.”
Cooper says he reached out to predecessors, consumers and others in the business to try and “re-ground” what the brand was about – a strategy that ultimately spawned the company’s “Made From Canada” strategy and resulting campaigns.
“If you go back 10 or 15 years ago, there was quite a bit of quality messaging in telling the product story on brands like Canadian and Coors Light. But at the time, it just wasn’t as interesting to consumers,” Cooper said.
“One of the key takeaways of going back and learning from history was that the importance of the authenticity of the beer had really shifted in consumer’s minds.”
At the beginning of the year, Molson restructured its marketing teams, bringing its public relations, social, digital and marketing efforts more closely together into one team. It was a move, Cooper says, that has “sharpened accountabilities” and helped formerly independent teams combine their efforts on new campaigns.
Cooper cites the company’s Olympic campaign for Canadian as one example of the team’s new effectiveness. A paid Twitter campaign generated favourites and re-tweets from 25% of users who saw the company’s tweets – 400,000 earned impressions, he says. The campaign’s TV component also generated 2 million views on YouTube, and a beer fridge in Sochi that dispensed free beer to those with Canadian passports generated $100-million in earned PR globally, $30-million of which was in Canada
“That was really enabled by bringing this team together around social and PR and all these disciplines that have normally been thought of as independent,” Cooper said.
Going forward, Cooper is planning to bring all of that talent to bear on reinvigorating Coors Light. Though the brand remains top beer in Canada, he says returning the brand to growth is “critical.”
And if there’s one thing he’s learned from his Molson work, it’s that “being an authentic brand is easy to say, [but] difficult to do.”
