There are brands that fade away, and then there are brands that serve as teaching materials for generations of marketing students who will never taste the product. Schlitz is about to become the latter, permanently.
Pabst Brewing Company announced that it is retiring the Schlitz label, ending a run that stretches back to 1849 and that includes some of the most celebrated — and some of the most self-inflicted — chapters in American advertising history. The brand, which once commanded the largest share of the American beer market, will no longer be produced.
For those who came of age during Schlitz's heyday, the name conjures a specific kind of postwar confidence: "The beer that made Milwaukee famous," a line so good it hardly needed a campaign around it. Later came "Go for the gusto," which positioned the lager as the beverage of robust living and which, for a time, actually worked. Schlitz was the beer of ambition, or at least the beer of people who wanted to seem ambitious while watching a ball game.
What happened next has been recounted in business schools with the solemnity usually reserved for case studies involving hubris and cost-cutting. In the 1970s, the company reformulated its recipe to speed production and reduce expenses. The new Schlitz did not taste like the old Schlitz. Consumers noticed. (They usually do.)
The brand never recovered. By 1982, it had been sold to Stroh's; eventually it landed in the portfolio of Pabst, where it joined other heritage labels whose names now function primarily as nostalgia.
Pabst did not immediately respond to requests for comment on what, if any, memorial observances are planned.
For an industry that spends considerable energy talking about brand equity, Schlitz remains the clearest illustration of what happens when the product stops living up to the promise. The gusto, it turned out, was not infinitely renewable.
Original story published in adage.com: "It’ll be great to see you at Cannes—I hope I recognize you - Ad Age"