Price of playing poker - Adolph Coors Co. marketing - interview

Modern Brewery Age, July 10, 1989

We went to Coors Light in 1978 after a great deal of soul searching because consumers were switching, they were looking for something different in a product. Coors beer, itself, had been advertised as `America's fine light beer;' in fact, at one time we advertised it as being a low calorie beer, with 13.8-percent fewer calories than other premium beers.

After the war, things began to grow here so rapidly that we kind of forgot that we really invented the successful low-calorie product. But we realized the Coors brand could not be all things to all people. Coors was stuck as a brand with a lighter taste but not lower calorie, per say. And it had an image of being a bit weak and watery. So people were leaving the Coors brand for Miller Lite on the one end of the spectrum and Budweiser and Miller on the other end of the spectrum, saying that Coors just didn't have enough flavor. So the Coors Lite brand gave us a brand to compete for those consumers who were going to be leaving the Coors brand anyway, looking for a low-calorie beer, and gave us an opportunity to begin to take some of our consumers back that we lost.