How’s the Pepsi challenge fit into this?
Pepsi was clearly saying, “We’re better than Coke, here taste it and see don’t you agree”
Pepsi conducted actual claim substantiation research – blind taste tests – to support the claim, which was not “we’re better than Coke,” but was specifically worded as, “nationwide, more people prefer the taste of Pepsi over Coca-Cola.”
Wording is important in making competitive/superiority claims which will hold up to legal and regulatory scrutiny, though good ones (and good marketing) will lead a lot of people to believe more than what the claim actually states.
Back in the 90s, Pepsi got Cartoonist-of-the-Moment Daniel Clowes to draw a bunch of edgy looking faces and plastered 'em on bottles of OK Soda.That’s when I knew the folks in Marketing were courting a new demographic. How well did it work? Well, I haven’t seen OK Soda around lately, but it probably worked out OK for Clowes.
Pabst Blue Ribbon was a fading legacy brand, and must have been shocked when Dennis Hopper shouted “Heiniken? Fuck that shit. Pabst Blue Ribbon!” In Blue Velvet. To have an evil creep like Frank Booth extol your brand in scatalogical terms was surely going to kill it off.
But then, suddenly all the bars that used to push Rolling Rock as your cheap swill option switched to Pabst (which they called PBR) and that was what all the cool kids wanted.
Lesson learned, right? But no. Now the Marketing guys are doing an OK Soda thing on PBR in the expectation that it will give a much-needed boost (since Blue Velvet was 40 years ago) to their once again moribund product image. I’m afraid it’s going to do the opposite. Not that I care what happens to a beer I don’t drink much, but it’s a move that smacks of desperation. I mean, what does Pabst have going for it other than a hopelessly square slot in the brand-image universe, which is its own kind of cool. Well, now that’s all shot to hell. Godzilla? Really? You can’t just make a Cultural Moment happen by slapping an old movie monster on your product.
Maybe now Rolling Rock can make its long delayed comeback in the Rock and Roller’s choice footrace. Which was an accident - the beer was around long before the music, but that name gave it cachet, and I should know, since as a kid in Clubland I was primed to fall for it because I dug the coincidental perfection of it, even if the swill was nothing special.
“33”
You’re missing (or unaware of) another event in there, regarding PBR. It wasn’t really Blue Velvet that did much for them (and any effect which it had was probably short-lived); it was that hipsters had started drinking it at bars in Portland around 2000, at a time when Pabst was dying, and Pabst’s marketing team tapping into that cult following, which revived the brand and the company.
Since then, Pabst has regularly engaged in funky, goofy, and non-traditional marketing.
Portland? Yeah, I’ve heard of that. That Fred Armisen / Carrie Brownstein place. Who’d have guessed?
The Portland I know is the one in Maine, and right now it’s cool, so don’t tell anyone. I have a feeling that the Oregon one has passed its sell-by date.
Oh, and I’m not saying you’re wrong but 2000 seems awfully late for the PBR renaissance to have started. No, I’m sticking to my Frank Booth jumping-off point. If there’s one line from that movie that stuck with people, it’s the “Fuck that shit” one.
I’m sure there were other reasons, but if you’re a young hipster, you’re going to wanna drink the beer that Frank drank. So many lousy brands to choose from, but Damn!
Read the two articles I linked to. But, if your reality suits you better, knock yourself out. 
My reality is the real one. I skimmed your two articles, and neither mentions Frank Booth or Blue Velvet. I assume they were both written by people too young to have experienced Frank and his “FTS” moment at the time that it really mattered.
I do know that it wasn’t long afterwards that the bars (mostly music dives) in Boston that never sold Pabst, suddenly did. Do I have notarised proof of that? No. I was just there.
I’m sure some sharpster in Portland or somewhere is happy to boast “it was all me”.
But 2000? Uh-uh.
For the record, my cheap choice is Miller Genuine Draft. Not High Life.
I’m not saying that that didn’t happen. I’m saying that any bump which Pabst got on the heels of its mention in Blue Velvet (1986) was short-lived, and only temporarily slowed what was a steady decline in sales for PBR through the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m sorry that multiple well-sourced articles, and quotes from people who worked on the brand, don’t jibe with your memory and belief that it was that movie, and that quote, which revitalized Pabst.
Nitpick: OK Soda was actually a Coca-Cola Company product. (But I didn’t know that without looking it up.)
Maybe it struggled, but without Blue Velvet it would have been doornail dead long before what you call its revival date. While waiting for that to happen, it was still a staple at bars inhabited by the young crowd. Not everyone drank it and craft-beer snobbery was on the rise then and shows no sign of stopping, but the difference between almost dead and really dead is what we are talking about.
I don’t follow beer trends, and if you want out of some misplaced civic pride, or because you do follow brew sales charts, or because you read a couple of articles that don’t go very deep into it, to claim you have the key that unlocks the story, fine. Knock yourself out, as the saying goes. Yes, my sample size is confined to one region. But they were pushing PBRs to cash-strapped, beer-starved kids all through the 90s.
I’d be interested in knowing if Heineken took a dive around then.
PS You got me on the OK Soda thing. I thought might be Pepsi but couldn’t be bothered to look it up.
The only reason you feel that these articles “don’t go very deep into it” is that they don’t mention your hypothesis, or match your personal anecdote. You yourself just said that “I don’t follow beer trends,” but you reject evidence that doesn’t support your personal, local experience.
I have no “misplaced civic pride” in Portland (I’ve never even been there), nor no particular interest in hipsters, or whatever. But I am a professional marketer and a market researcher, and I have a large number of friends and former colleagues who have worked extensively in the beer industry – including, as I mentioned upthread, Pabst’s former CEO. The story of how Pabst came back from the dead is well-known in the marketing and advertising industry, and I’m sorry that Blue Velvet, Frank Booth, and “fuck that shit” don’t play a significant role in that.
Maybe it did have that effect in some bars in Boston. I don’t know; I wasn’t there. But there’s no evidence that it had a major effect nationally, nor that the mention in Blue Velvet turned around the brand’s long-term decline, which it continued to suffer for more than a decade after that movie.
But, please, keep insisting that I’m full of shit.
Gojira!!