Tyson Badders, Individualism and Collectivism in Samuel Adams Advertising

Samuel Adams is a domestic beer brand manufactured by the Boston Beer Company, a small brewery that almost exclusively produces Sam Adams. The corporation currently resides as a strong and growing small scale brewer, or craft brewer, in an industry dominated by large domestic and foreign competition. This unique position forces the company to be especially effective and efficient in its advertising campaigns. Sam Adams has launched an ad campaign that centers on a series of television commercials highlighting the unique aspects of their product. Each commercial spotlights a specific element of Sam Adams such as the hops selection, styles, employees, owner, brewing standards or awards. The advertisements promote their product by celebrating its popularity, describing their awards, talking with beer drinkers and bar tenders and listing unique styles that meet everyone’s desires. The commercials also exalt the individuality of Sam Adams and Sam Adams drinkers by focusing on the uniqueness of the beer, its style, standards, ingredients and fermenting process. These two strategies, however, present an incompatibility by heralding its popularity among beer drinkers, while simultaneously celebrating the individualism in the number of varieties of Sam Adams available and its unique characteristics. Although the entire Sam Adams ad campaign exhibits this dual message, the chapter 10 commercial entitled “18…and Counting” best portrays these two advertising styles and demonstrates their unexpected harmony.

The technique of ‘group think’ in advertising represents the first style companies exploited when television commercials developed, according to David Wallace (Wallace 54). Wallace argues that the first commercials “were all about the group” and sold their product by connecting it with being included in a group that individuals would want to join (Wallace 55). Sam Adams utilizes this technique to establish the legitimacy of their beer and encourage its sales by creating advertisements centered on this practice. The presence of the brewer and owner, Jim Koch, in the ad and conversing with strangers on the street, reinforces this theory as Jim appears to personally extend an invitation to viewers to be included in an exclusive group of Sam Adams drinkers. The company’s website explicitly states the success of this popularity technique, explaining that, “when people in Boston heard that Samuel Adams Boston Lager® had been voted the ‘Best Beer In America,’ it made them sit up and take notice. Their brains finally believed what their taste buds had been telling them” (Samuel Adams Awards page). This statement clearly expresses their marketing strategy and elevates it to a higher level by assuming that consumers cannot enjoy their product until they realize its popularity. The intense importance Sam Adams places on their product’s acceptance among the public explains the prevalence of commercials concerning and lauding their beers awards. By portraying Sam Adams in a popular light, the company effectively employs the advertising strategy based on the attraction of the group to market its product.

This emphasis seems to indicate that Sam Adams favors the group rather than the individual advertising strategy despite the company’s focus on the uniqueness of their product. The primary drive behind their advertising campaign centers on Sam Adams’ distinctive taste and style and rare brewing processes and ingredients. In an effort to differentiate themselves from their competition and celebrate their individualism they even alienate entire demographics of the population in their advertising. The Sam Adams’ “Not for Beerginners” commercial presents Adams as such a unique drink that it only appeals to seasoned beer drinkers. The corporation values the uniqueness of their beers and consumers so much that they ignore an entire portion of the market. This individualist attitude and strategy fall precisely in line with Wallace’s explanation of more recent commercial strategies that “now make their appeal to the lone viewer…[by] helping the viewer ‘express himself,’ assert his individuality, ‘stand out from the crowd’” (Wallace 55). Sam Adams draws on this desire by highlighting the fact that their styles and ingredients differ greatly from competitor’s products, setting apart drinkers who enjoy Sam Adams. This advertising strategy combines with the company’s small beginnings and status as a craft brewer to present the image of an exclusive product, which plays on the desire for consumers to stand out from the crowd (Sam Adams History page).

This duality in focus expresses itself in the emphasis on the number and variety of styles in the advertisement, effectively demonstrating Sam Adams’ desire to appeal to both popularity and individualism to sell their product. By offering a wide range and variety of styles and incorporating the tag line, “Which is your favorite?,” the company implies that a style or type of Sam Adams’ beer exists for everyone. On the other hand, the styles are all unique and tailored to individual tastes and Sam Adams creates commercials centered on this information. Wallace mentions another individualist ad, which influences consumers by promoting a perfume with an “‘individual scent’” for “each woman’s ‘unique body chemistry’” (Wallace 55). Sam Adams, likewise, sells a product with so many styles that there seems to exist one for every consumer. The commercial also encourages consumers to choose a taste that they individually prefer, rather than follow the crowd. These strategies create a direct contradiction in which Sam Adams encourages consumers to drink their beer because of its wide appeal, while simultaneously urging them to discover their individual taste and drink their product because of the unique styles available.

The portrayal of the Sam Adams drinkers in the commercial represents an additional example of this incongruence. Employing strategies similar to the commercials Wallace describes, which incorporate groups enjoying a product together, Sam Adams encourages the purchase of their beer by depicting individuals enjoying a Sam Adams with others. The ad interviews several people who drink Sam Adams and combined with the interviews and appearance of the public in other commercials, in the campaign, further indicates the popularity of the beverage. Watchers feel the urge to drink to fit in with all the people discussing and enjoying a glass of Sam Adams. The wide variety of individuals seen in the ad indicates that nearly everyone drinks Sam Adams and therefore every watcher will enjoy it as well. Contradictorily, the individuals in the clip represent unique personalities, tastes and even languages. These facts promote not popularity, because these issues make it difficult for commonality and a group mentality to form, but individuality and drinking Sam Adams to become different. Once again, Sam Adams promotes its product by collectivism and individuality through the same element in the commercial.

The confrontation between group and individual focus in advertising appears across the marketing field. According to Wallace this conflict exists even outside the advertising realm and feels that, “U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal belonging” (Wallace 54). Tom Wolfe experiences the same feeling, when observing individualism in a gathering dominated by teens who express uniformity in dress, interests and actions. His attempt to rationalize “custom cars” in a world dominated by a common form parallels the duality of Sam Adams commercials. (Wolfe 76). Both Wolfe and Wallace describe the crowd when used in combination with the individual as either “something fearsome, something that can swallow you up, erase you, keep you from being noticed” (Wallace 56) or a mindless hoard “dressed exactly alike” floating “like plankton” in the culture (Wolfe 75-76). These negatives views of the crowd in the individualist commercial and culture contrast with the Sam Adams commercials that place great importance upon celebrating both the individual and group drinking a Sams. The tour groups, bar tenders, beer drinkers, workers and administrative personnel all combine to create a pleasant crowd of Sam Adams drinkers not “a mass of identical featureless eyes,” while still maintaining the importance of individuality in choice of beer and style (Wallace 56). This unusual and unique approach to advertising, which combines populism and individualism seamlessly and harmoniously to promote a product, represents an honest and innovative strategy.

Samuel Adams is a unique company founded on the principles of individuality and collectivism. From its foundations, Jim Koch had a desire to create “a niche in the competitive beer market for a high-quality American beer” (Sam Adams History page). His personal attention to selling this new beer individually and growing it into the successful craft brewery it has become demands the use of both individualist principles, which promote the product as unique (high-quality American beer), and populist principles, which herald the beers popularity and exploding sales. While these strategies appear to conflict and simply to attract consumers by supposedly supplying both desires, they represent the best techniques for accomplishing the goals Koch laid out at the creation of Sam Adams. The utilization of individual and group advertising methods will assist in the formation of an original beer that differentiates itself and its drinkers from typical American beer, while simultaneously growing to become a globally recognized and celebrated brewer.

Works Cited

Samuel Adams. 2008. The Boston Beer Company. 20 April 2008. .

Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. 21-82.

Wolfe, Tom. “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. 75-104.