Partly Thanks To Me, Chinese Capitalism Got Its Start In The U.S. When The Beijing Olympics Was A Mere Gleam In Their Eyes.
Competition, as we will discover during the Olympics, does not seem to scare off the Chinese. A few decades ago, when they contemplated making a move on American capitalism, they chose to go into the beer business. Perhaps naively, perhaps because of the overwhelming challenge, they chose a category with fierce competitors like Budweiser and Miller who have been known on occasion to eat their young.
Who would ever have thought that the Chinese would choose the beer category? But leave it to them to surprise us. How they got into to the beer business is almost hysterical. It easily deserves an episode on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Marshall Goldberg, the son in law of the man who owned Manischewitz Wine, traveled to China and struck a deal with the Chinese government to import Tsingtao beer. And what, you ask yourself, did the Chinese people know about brewing beer? Right. Nothing! But the Germans do.
According to drinking lore, the Germans never went anywhere without eventually building a brewery. So, in 1903, with gusto and enthusiasm, they built one and named it for the town. The Larry David irony is hardly missed on anyone: The Germans build a brewery that is owned by the Chinese whose beer is distributed by a nice Jewish company from Brooklyn. Global marketing has its roots in this success story. Who would have guessed?
Upon getting the rights, the Manischewitz people were out to prove to the Chinese government that they could successfully sell Chinese beer-to-beer- hugging, beer-loving Americans. The Chinese government was skeptical but the Manischewitz people were up for the challenge.
Several advertising agencies were asked to pitch the account and show how they would ignite the American beer drinkers to embrace Tsingtao. At the time, I co-owned an ad agency with a good friend of mine Barry Tannenholz, called Romann & Tanneholz. Naturally, we accepted the invitation to pitch.
Our effort helped put Tsingtao on the map.
First, we conducted consumer tests to gauge the likelihood of someone buying a beer imported from China. As we discovered, the likelihood was nil and none. Consumers responded with laughter and ridicule. On the whole, beer drinkers categorically rejected the notion of buying an imported beer from China. So we had to reverse engineer our strategy.
Failing the success of pursuing the hardcore beer drinker, we set our sites on the wine drinker, hoping they would provide more luck. And surprisingly, they did: For every four glasses of wine a wine drinker drank, they also drank one bottle of beer. And their choice of beer was selected on different criteria: it was selected on the beer’s “cultural power,” not its “popularity” among the happy-go-lucky belly-flopper market.
The scenario went something like this: When a wine drinker walked into a party and was offered a glass of wine by the host or hostess, they would on occasion, reject the offer of wine and opt for a beer. “No thanks,” they would rejoin, “I will have a bottle of beer instead.” Here comes the cache-laden request: “In fact, make it Tsingtao, you know, that beer from China.” At this point, we figured we nailed the strategy, now all we had to do was nail the creative. With no money and far from having the ability to create Internet-buzz, we created a ten-second TV spot that literally broke the bank.
Remember when you were kid on the beach digging through the sand and you would ask your mother: “Hey, Mom, if I dug all the way down, where would I get to?” and she would reply: “China.” (Talk about the early days of metaphor.) That got our creative juices flowing and lead to a TV spot that got both the Chinese government and the Manischewitz people very excited.
Now for the TV spot: Imagine on top of your TV screen, a glass turned upside down and from the bottom of your screen a bottle of Tsingtao was being poured up against gravity into the glass as the voice over intones: “Tsingtao, the beer from the other side of the world. Once you taste it, you will flip.” At this point the picture flips placing the glass and the Tsingtao bottle, still pouring, into an upright position as the voiceover continues: “Tsingtao, imported from China.”
After the introduction of that commercial, China was headed towards its first capitalistic success in the U.S. Today, thanks to an awful lot of people, Tsingtao is the best-known Chinese product in the world.
Possibly, the true beginning of the global Olympics.
