Miller High Life Goes On a Loyalty Binge

The Miller Brewing Company has never backed off the almost punnish nature of its Miller High Life brand, given the slang use of the word high.

“High Life” has been, after all, the brand trademark for decades—to the point that a couple years back Miller could release a short-lived product trademarked, simply, Miller Beer. It is in this spirit of shirking subtle communication points that Miller Brewing has introduced the High Life Extras loyalty initiative—in essence, its hoppy version of MyCokeRewards.

Participants in the High Life Extras program go to the Miller Web site to log codes found on 12-, 24- and 30-packs, earning 10 points per bottle or can. Points are redeemable not for chasers but for screen-savers (purchase investment, one six-pack, or 60 points), logo items, and all the way up to an outdoor fire pit for 31,000 points.

On the surface, this promotion seems unremarkable (in a positive sense), but ultimately I think its greatest impact may be putting Miller squarely in the sights of Mothers Against Drunk Marketing. I’m surprised that Miller has not yet appeared in the center of a controversy more heated than that experienced following Miller’s introduction of Lite Beer, which in the long-ago days of way-back-when infuriated members of the Silent Letter Antidefamation League.

The rub comes from the program’s time restriction. Points can be earned and redeemed only until Feb. 28 of 2009—after one year of program operation. The strategic flaw from a pure loyalty standpoint is its short-term nature, communicating no long-range value of engagement to the customer, who might be inclined to respond, “It’s nice that you’ll appreciate me . . . for a little while, anyway.”

Time limits certainly reduce the importance of aspirational awards, and this is where the subtle communication of getting “high” resurfaces. The fire pit sounds pretty attractive, actually, but to earn 31,000 points, one would have to buy enough beer to make a liver transplant a viable redemption option. Let’s do the math. Suppose the Miller Extras collector began the very day that the promotion took effect. That collector would have to buy 8.5 12-ouncers a day to score that fire pit before the program ended. Extras, indeed.

Consumer groups descended on MyCokeRewards in its early days for supposedly forcing youngsters to drink enough carbonation to induce sugar shock. What do you think those groups will do concerning a program involving alcohol? Miller couldn’t do any more to induce controversy by inserting some old Camel cigarette coupons in the packaging.

Certainly, taking the time limit off this hoppy sprint would be a reasonable way to broaden consumer access to the initiatives and its payoffs. Another would be offering additional non-alcohol earn potential (there are a couple in the program), as arch-rival Budweiser as done with its Budweiser Rewards Visa initiative. As well, High Life Extras could have benefitted from low-investment/high-payoff reward options.

An auction would have provided a classic solution—one that, in fact, Miller has used before. In its Get the Goods promotion, legal-age customers earned Beer Bucks to bid on such brand-complimentary lifestyle items as sports memorabilia and a Colorado whitewater rafting trip. The auction enabled Miller to collect hundreds of thousands of customer names and contact details, build brand awareness, and lay the groundwork for segmentation (based on the number of points collected).

Why not bring back the auction to allow consumers a shot at that fire pit—or, better yet, at winning something like an all-expenses-paid trip to tour the brewery and a day at a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game at the not-coincidentally-named Miller Park.

Such strategies would strengthen program relevance, increase perceived access to aspirational rewards, and deflate concerns that, by the nature of its goal structure, the program promotes binge buying and the likely ensuing use of the binge purchases.

But as it stands, Miller High Life Extras isn’t a loyalty program. It’s a chugging contest.

Bill Brohaugh ([email protected]) is senior marketing content manager at LoyaltyOne.