The early 1990s were an exciting time for me. I had landed at Brandweek magazine and was getting my feet wet in the marketing racket. Similarly, pair of blasphemous malt liquor purveyors from Brooklyn were launching a line of iced teas called AriZona, named for a state they had never set foot in.

Even as marketing pros were giving me an immersion course in the subtleties of unaided awareness, consideration sets and propensity to buy, I was also getting a close-up look at another approach: two guys painting big-boy beer cans in pretty pastels, stacking them high on bodega shelves and watching them fly. When rivals squeezed their beer can supplies, the duo turned their artistry to square-shouldered, wide-mouthed glass-bottles. Seeing mysterious ginseng vials moving briskly in some inner-city corner stores, they put the stuff into their tea and watched even suburban consumers flock to this early functional item. At least in my backyard, New York, it looked like they had a real business.

“They’ve done okay so far,” the marketing experts would whisper to their new marketing-novice friend. “But they don’t have a real brand yet.”

That would only happen, they assured me, once the AriZona guys started doing real brand building – hiring an ad agency (perhaps theirs), developing a media strategy and scheduling a calendar of consumer promotions.

Well, the AriZona guys did make a half-hearted attempt to interview ad agencies, until both sides realized they were wasting their time. The closest the pair got to a media breakthrough was pasting some ads on the back of city buses. I think they did a promo with Schwinn bikes once, too. Pretty thin gruel, by marketing standards.

Still, a decade later, AriZona’s a brand, one with a couple of billion dollars’ worth of sales over that period. The company has still done little conventional brand building, but it nevertheless connotes innovative formulas and dazzling packaging, rather than, say, the ability to realize yourself (“Just do it!”) or to find stunning reserves of determination within yourself (“Is it in you?). Fair enough. AriZona still seems to energize the store shelves it sits upon. That’s more than well-planned conventional brand rollouts like, uh, Fruitopia.

There’s a useful lesson here: We may be better off viewing brands as existing in hierarchies, in which a middle-tier brand like AriZona that consistently brings excitement and quality at a fair price can be as powerful in the market as one that more overtly strives for cachet, sophistication and cutting-edge image. After all, we’re living in a time when even some store brands are proving  to carry more innovation and shelf appeal than the national brands they supposedly mimic. So let’s not get too snobbish about the wonders of traditional brand building.

It’s interesting to apply this lens to other fast-growing beverage brands. Fuze, for one, is growing briskly without showing any inclination to engage in the elaborate branding hijinks of, say, Vitaminwater. Will Fuze therefore sputter put before attaining Vitaminwater’s size? We’ll see.

It’s also an interesting question when it’s applied to Nestle Waters North America. In contrast to national players like Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coke’s Dasani, which have undertaken concerted brand-building initiatives, NWNA has thrived with a grouping of regional brands that have done little image-building over the years aside from hinting at the purity of their sources. Will Nestle at some point be better off consolidating their brands under national banner? I think that would be a big mistake. After all, the national brands’ efforts are hardly convincing, judging by their blow-‘em-out pricing strategies. Besides, many consumers seem to have an innate preference for products that have an authentic local or regional identity, as Nestle’s do.

Now that I’m marketing expert myself, my whispered message to Nestle would be: don’t get fancy. Contrary to what some marketing mavens might suggest, you do have brands, and they still look stronger than the challengers’ brands, no matter how slick the campaign.  (Beverage Spectrum, April 2006)