Tastes great! Very slightly more filling!

So here's my question: why does this store even carry Michelob Ultra?

Stocking a rival product at your TV commercial store that only sells one product just so you can shit on said product when a customer wanders in and naively tries to buy it seems like a long way to go. You had to purchase that beer from the distributor, man! You are losing money by never selling it! You don't see the "Disaronno Only" bar doing shit like this.

Miller has been running ads for quite some time now on the premise "we have more taste than Bud Light and Michelob Ultra" - this ad is from nearly 20 years ago (and for good measure features an early use of eventual annoying Twitter meme "Let that sink in"). Recently it got to the point that Anheuser-Busch actually filed a complaint with the National Advertising Division. Miller apparently had enough to back up their claim, however, and A-B's complaint was broadly dismissed. If you look at the fine print of this ad, the source for the claim is apparently a 2018 taste test done by the "Institute for Perception," and yes, that is a real thing.

If it seems weird that Miller Lite is going after Michelob Ultra, which it already outsells, apparently they've become concerned that Michelob Ultra has a "health halo," per Miller VP Anup Shah, which is leading to an increase in market share among calorie-conscious drinkers who haven't already switched to one of those hard seltzers or whatever. As it is, that article indicates that light beer is losing sales volume - I have to assume at least some of that slack is being taken up by the White Claw corner of the market. Miller may brag about having "more taste" than Michelob Ultra, but a lot of people seem willing to consume a handful more calories (most major hard seltzers have about 100 per 12 ounces) in order to avoid drinking something that tastes like shitty beer. I don't have much use for hard seltzer myself but it's clearly having a moment. You wouldn't think there'd be that much overlap between the Miller Lite crowd and the White Claw crowd but I do wonder how long it will be before we see one of these big light beer brands train their sights on the new competition. Anheuser-Busch has already settled on "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," but what about Miller?

Oh. They already did that two years ago, you say?

In theory I can get on board with this. The hard seltzer thing absolutely felt like a fad when it first exploded and there were suddenly 500 different brands at every store. Everyone even remotely adjacent to the category seemed to jump in - light beer brand? Hard seltzer. Vodka brand? Hard seltzer (or at least something similar enough). Sparkling water brand? Hard seltzer. If it really was a dumb bandwagon, dismissing calls to jump on it could make you into the same kind of farsighted genius who avoided the "Metaverse" or the whole NFT thing. (Oops.)

In reality, however, the hard seltzer bubble (see what I did there?) has yet to burst, and in fact Miller's parent company MolsonCoors makes multiple hard seltzers including the aforementioned Topo Chico. The fact that they've yet to decide to slap the Miller name on one in a time when beer sales are falling is laudable in a way, but may be a commercial error. Time will tell on that one, I guess, but with more alcoholic options than ever, what kind of person is really reaching for a Miller Lite these days? I guess it remains one of the lower-calorie options if you just want to get a cheap buzz going, but it does seem like the average drinker might not be satisfied with that alone. Ultimately I think Miller Lite is probably going to have to start making some ads that do a little more repositioning than just "tastes better than Michelob Ultra." Budweiser has seen the writing on the wall and is trying to make their appeal more cultural - maybe Miller Lite isn't a brand that has that option, but it just seems like they need to try something else.