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Bass Ale: Bringing It All Back Home
Faced with competitive domestic and international markets, an advertising firm working for England’s Bass Brewers recently sought to align Bass Ale with authenticity, heritage, and history (‘‘Bass’ Titanic Mission’’ 1996). Building on its customers’ desire for customized, unique, and ‘‘extreme’’ experiences and places, the firm tied its advertising campaign to one of the most glamorous tragedies of the twentieth century—the sinking of the Titanic. The public’s seemingly limitless fascination with the loss of the ‘‘unsinkable’’ luxury liner has led to numerous portrayals of the sinking on television, on IMAX, on the stage, and in film. The ship has mesmerized cultural critics for decades and came to once again dominate the popular media when its sunken remains were located in the North Atlantic in the mid-1980s. With a longevity outlasting any natural disasters (such as tidal waves, earthquakes, tornados, or killer asteroids) that have been featured in Hollywood films and television movies, the wreck of the Titanic provided Bass Brewers with a unique and exclusive site for a tourist-like promotional event.Bass associated itself with a televised expedition that attempted to raise a portion of the sunken wreck and also staked a proprietorial claim to a part of the ship’s cargo—the 12,000 beer bottles that are believed to have gone down with the luxury liner. RMS Titanic Inc.—the firm that holds the salvaging rights to the ship—required Bass to rethink the nature of its promotion on a number of occasions. Thus, the grand prize winner of Bass’s sweepstakes was not allow to descend to the wreck with a scientific crew in the submarine the Nautile because critics condemned such overt commercialization of the final resting place of so many people. Bass’s U.S. importer, Guinness Import Corporation (GIC), instead offered ten contest winners the opportunity to sail to the expedition site on the luxury yacht Ballymena. Bass promoted the exclusive nature of the expedition, noting the $1,800 to $6,950 paid by the other two thousand expedition members, including celebrities such as Burt Reynolds, Apollo II astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and some survivors of the Titanic’s final voyage (Ringle 1996).
Although the attempt to raise a portion of the Titanic was one of the most unusual events ever used for commercial promotions and tie-ins, the Bass Titanic sweepstakes itself serves as a fairly standard example of contemporary multimedia and event marketing. Not surprisingly, the Bass sweepstakes and the RMS Titanic Inc. marketing of the cruise shared an interest in similar demographic and consumer profiles. For example, RMS Titanic ran conventional print advertisements in some of the largest daily newspapers in the United States and sent customized letters marked ‘‘URGENT’’ to residents in high-income zip codes, inviting recipients to ‘‘person- ally witness the first-ever raising of a major part [of the Titanic]’’ (Ringle 1996, B1, B8). For Bass and its U.S. importer, Guinness Import Corporation, however, the sweepstakes highlighted their product and simultaneously built a customized database from the demographic information they solicited from contestants. In addition to radio ads, the campaign also included point-of-purchase entry forms (which request name, address, age, and so on) and a Web site with its own demographic solicitations and contest entry forms (‘‘Bass’ Titanic Mission’’ 1996).
Bass’s promotional event also benefitted from the Discovery Channel’s documentation and subsequent telecast of the expedition. The cable channel’s contribution of some $3 million toward the overall $5 million expedition budget saved the entire project—and Bass’s sweepstakes contest—from indefinite postponement. Members of the scientific community and the press—including some who had voiced concerns about the cruise—subsequently questioned the ethics of televising a mass burial site (Ringle 1996). And the bad press did not stop there. The event itself did not go as planned: some seventeen hundred onlookers—including Bass’s contest winners—were forced to abandon their cruise after encountering bad weather. The attempt to raise a portion of the wreck likewise ended in failure after a series of technical glitches (Wilson-Smith 1996).Thus, an event that had promised cutting-edge submersible technology in action, a live video transmission from the sunken wreck to a nearby celebrity-filled luxury yacht, a broadcast later on cable television, and salvaged cargo that would be put on display in exhibition halls across the United States and the world became ultimately a media spectacle. By including everyday Bass drinkers, consumers, and contest entrants, though, the expedition also publicized the underwater site, the contest promotion, and finally the product. In other words, the appeal of Bass’s contest—within the overall marketing campaign—was based on the opportunity for a so-called average person to enter into the company of famous and wealthy people for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The incorporation of such ‘‘elite’’ consumers in the promotion moreover highlights the contest’s demographic (profiling) imperative within Bass’s overall sales, advertising, and marketing plans.Ironically, with all the potential ethical and political pitfalls that predetermined the staging of the event as a whole, the ultimate failure of the cruise and the salvage attempt at the site of the wreck contributed to the myth of the Titanic as a ‘‘persistent disaster’’ (Heyer 1995). The salvage failure meant the loss of potential exhibition fees for RMS Titanic Inc., but Bass’s contest benefited from its association with the Titanic. By all accounts, Bass’s Titanic promotion was such a success that the company revisited the same theme the following summer (1997). It ran a print advertisement in the New York Times (May 18, 1997, 25) that offered customers a mail-in cash-back coupon that required consumers to include an address, the universal product code (or bar code) from a purchased product, and a dated receipt, thus enabling Guinness Import Corporation to map its products, consumers, and points of sales. The advertisement also depicted a luxury steam line and a bottle of Bass Ale with the following invitation:
Retrieving Bass Ale from the Titanic required lots of wet suits and shark repellent. Getting it home merely requires a passport. It’s your chance to make history. Bass Ale invites you and a guest on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to England to return one of the bottles we’ve recovered from the legendary Titanic.
