Tonight’s marketing class featured another popular case by the folks at Harvard Business Review. This one focused on the Mountain Man Brewing Company’s decision whether to launch a lite version of their popular beer for coal miners. Again, it was another case with a corny made-up sounding name. Yeah, the name of the company and their product sounded perfectly like something that would be popular in West Virginia. For purposes of the analysis of this case, it didn’t really matter much whether the names were real or not. They were distracting, but the names didn’t matter that much.

The problem with a beer for rugged, blue collar workers having a lite option should be pretty glaring. I’m sure all the coal miners are watching their figures. Unless you’re a coal miner, who really knows what goes on that far under ground? Maybe it’s like the West Virginia equivalent of Brokeback Mountain. Considering common coal miner ailments such as black lung, the desire for a lite beer is probably not driven by coal miners’ typical focus on health consciousness.

But while the idea of a company that makes a beer called Mountain Man Lager creating a lite beer seems far-fetched, there are some compelling reasons to consider doing this. The case pointed out that lite beers were all the rage, especially among women, the well-to-do and college age crowds. Mountain Man Brewing Company wasn’t capitalizing on those groups. Sticking with its current product only would lead to a projected loss of 2% of Mountain Man’s revenue each year. It was apparent that if the company went with this offering having pictures of coal miners on the bottle wouldn’t work out too well. Maybe pictures of hikers would do better. You know, pictures of the types who live in cities, rail on about fixing the environment, drives their gas guzzling SUVs and mini-vans loaded with three or four kids (for reasons of safety, of course), buys their clothes at REI just to look the part. In other words, they are people who are trying to luck bad-ass and like they belong on a bottle of beer, but just can’t be believed, maybe like the illustrations on bottles of Rogue Ales.

Anyway, it was another fun case that taught me a lot about marketing and brand management. Just six more cases to go this semester.

Tomorrow was originally planned to be the day when U.S. television stations were to be completely switched from analog to digital transmission. There was a mad rush to get everyone in the entire country, including the poor and those in rural areas, hooked up with these special converter boxes. In the end, the deadline was pushed back to accomodate the lack of coupon subsidies for the boxes.

I always wondered what the urgency was for something like that. That is, until I started hearing Christian conspiracists claiming that cable could transmit signals both ways. Kind of reminded me of the video screens in the novel and movie 1984 where they can look into your room and talk back to you when you’re doing your government-sanctioned morning calisthenics. For those of you not familiar, 1984 is considered a classic. Yeah, that’s classic, as in the opposite of current. Um, yeah…

Anyway I thought the claims of converter boxes being two way communication devices were kind of nutty, that is until I saw the following:

With the tendency for both Big Brother (the government) and Little Brother (corporations) to more frequently violate the civil liberties of individual citizens, it makes me more than skeptical that these technologies probably aren’t going to be used for friendly chats and helpful little encouragement throughout the day. Perhaps it will be used for forced subliminal control. Add digital conversion to the list of innocuously-named technologies from Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL) to Smart Grid and the National Animal Identification System that will be making you less freer in the near future.

This is a top secret message for all of the white people out there. Yup, that’s right — white people only. Yeah, I know, I have a lot of Indian readers. Okay, you guys can read this too. Whatever you do, don’t tell any black persons. If you are a black person, stop reading this now. This is top secret, remember?

Barack Obama’s officially been President for about a month now. It’s time for the launch of Operation: Steal Black. For those of you who have forgotten the rules, I’ll briefly review them. First, find something that black people created, love and acknowledge as their own. Think about some of the subjects from previous stages of the project:  rock and roll, common American idioms and phrases derived from urban sources, any black comedian you can think of, hip hop, the Black Wall Street, even peanut butter. Then, find something really white to associate with it, kind of like the way we used Pat Boone to do all those R&B covers. Keep repeating this process until the culture at large believes that the target can only be perpetuated by the predominance of white society.

Okay, so now let’s talk about Obama. Don’t forget to keep calling him white. Talk up his time at private schools and all of his fancy food preferences. Repeatedly name drop all of white friends. Point out that, after a month, it is still being called the White House. Yeah, he plays basketball just like most white people, but he can’t jump. Got it? You’ve got your orders, now roll out!

File this one under sarcasm. That is, except for the stuff that black culture and history has contributed to America. That was for realz, and it wouldn’t be America without these contributions. It would be like Pat Boone Land, and that would suck.