HALLOWEEN EDITORIAL / OPINION

Coors to Elvira: We Sell Beer, Not Boobs

June 11, 1996 - Don't expect to see those slinky cardboard cutouts of Elvira standing alongside the Coors displays in your neighborhood 7-11 next Halloween. The Queen of the Night doesn't work for the Colorado brewer anymore, and to hear Elvira tell it, she won't miss being a beer shill. Though a company spokesperson denies it, Elvira says that letters from religious right customers--complaining that Halloween was the devil's holiday and Elvira was "like the devil-woman"--led the conservative beer maker to try to tone down Elvira and her ad campaign. "They once had six or eight Coors executives flown out from Chicago to discuss my cleavage," says Elvira. "I had every drop of hair that's on my wig taped to my chest so you wouldn't see my cleavage. They almost made me feel like I wasn't Elvira." Well, no job is worth sacrificing your identity. Elvira left Coors and plans to promote her own new microbrew label in a series of posters, public appearances, and store displays, which, she says, will show "plenty of cleavage." Coors, meanwhile, has found itself a new spokesbabe: Pamela Anderson Lee. "What," says Elvira, "are they gonna do with her cleavage?"

Brewing Beer and Problems

In scanning the bookstore shelves, I have long hoped to find a series of books called "Corporate Stupidity." This multivolume set would make the collected works of James Michener look like Cliff Notes, considering the number of business blunders that are committed daily.

My personal favorites are the sins of chief executives who ignore their managers or the workers on the factory floor. Or the debacles that follow when they tune out the most important audience -- their customers. There is no shortage of material from every industry, ranging from the Edsel to New Coke.

It's a familiar scene: company fouls up, chief executive rants when the headlines chronicle their foul-ups, six-figure consultants are hired to figure out who fouled up. If only these consultants would suggest that C.E.O.'s create a new office called the C.S.O. -- common sense officer. Its job description: the lone voice in a company who can tell the boss he might be wrong.

A recent example of a hefty dose of arrogance and the absence of anyone willing to apply some common sense comes from the Coors family, which started brewing beer in Golden, Colo., in 1876 and continued until the younger generations nearly ran the company into the ground by the early 1990's.

In "Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty" (William Morrow, $27), Dan Baum wisely singles the family out. Mr. Baum builds a strong narrative from the tale of how this big dysfunctional family made a lot of cold beer and money that ultimately financed conservative causes via the Republican Party and the Heritage Foundation. There is no lack of drama, starting with the patriarch Adolph Coors, who committed suicide by jumping out of a hotel window.

Succeeding generations had their problems, too, as Mr. Baum describes them. Pity his grandchildren, who must have dreaded Sundays. Adolph Jr. kept notes on his children's weekly misdeeds, then spanked them each Sunday. One of the offspring also committed suicide, also by jumping out of a hotel window.

But this book also gives corporate America a primer, as valuable as any business school case study, on how not to run a company.

For starters, Mr. Baum documents thoroughly how Coors abused workers. Sure, paternalism is sweet when it's served up as free lagers during break time in the brewery. But no amount of alcohol takes the sting out of being subjected to lie-detector tests, used to screen out what the book describes as "thieves, radicals and homosexuals." Some workers were asked if they had sex the previous night. At times, employees were forced to see psychologists. Brewery workers regarded themselves, in the words of one, as "overworked animals."

Equal rights took a while to catch up with Coors. Women lacked a bathroom in the brewery. There was one in the office for secretaries, but women working in the brewery were docked for time off if they left the plant to use it. One Coors family member said that a woman's place was "in the beauty parlor."

Not that management was spared from the odd behavior and whims of the Coors clan. When Bill Coors, in the third generation, caught the transcendental meditation bug, all executives were ordered to take classes in the practice.

The Coors company, meanwhile, showed an amazing lack of knowledge about behemoth competitors like Anheuser Busch. Members of the Busch family in St. Louis knew that their company was driven by the relentless marketing of Budweiser and other brands. But Coors didn't get it -- and balked at spending money on ads.

Indeed, marketing executives had short tenures at Coors. Some did manage a few hit ads, like one using "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" to sell beer at Halloween. But Jeff Coors, a born-again Christian and member of the fourth generation, ordered an end to Elvira's selling of Coors because he considered her satanic.

Other ads were ludicrous. Senior family members once ordered the company's advertising agency to make a commercial featuring Eva Gabor, a family friend who was generous to the Republican Party. Men in the focus group, viewing the aging actress, yelled: "What's she doing selling beer?"

Even product introductions lagged behind the competition. Coors was so behind the curve that it introduced a light beer three years after Miller Lite hit the shelves. The company botched other product introductions because it failed to do market research.

"Citizen Coors" clinches the story by telling how the blunders caught up with the company. It went public in 1975 at $32 a share. By 1978, investors lost half their money. Earnings were once 30 cents for every dollar of beer sold, but slipped to just a penny by 1990. Boycotts by unions and even barley farmers hurt its image and sales. Market share wilted everywhere, even in its home state of Colorado.

What did the Coors brothers do about it? They continued to focus on pushing conservative political causes in Washington. And they bought themselves a Lear jet.

What did the board members do? They dozed off during presentations on the demographics of beer drinkers. One of the best lines of the book likens a Coors board meeting to an Idi Amin cabinet meeting: nobody objects.

Senior management did seem to pay attention to one event -- the pollution of its famous Rocky Mountain spring waters. Clear Creek was the primary reason that Adolph Coors built his brewery in Golden. Trouble was, his brewery was responsible for contamination of the once-pristine waters. The book spends far too few pages on this environmental mess. Coors knew for nine years during the 1980's that it was destroying the spring water, but covered it up, according to Mr. Baum.

To help ease the bad public relations, Peter Coors, also in the fourth generation, coughed up a $30 million check for a baseball stadium in Denver. For the money, the team would play at, you guessed it, Coors Field.

The book's final pages chronicle the Coors men stepping aside and hiring an outsider to run the company. More than a century after the brewery was founded, the arrogance and indifference had caught up with them. Mr. Baum says they would have made more money by closing the place in the early 1980's and putting their money in a passbook account.

 

Every year, Halloween enthusiasts anxiously await the retail industry to begin their Halloween season and see who's first to stock products for the spooky season. Many stores begin stocking Halloween products as early as July!

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