how do you market without marketing? that’s the question for pabst and its pbr brand. anyone who’s spent time in places like chicago knows that all the cool kids have been drinking pabst blue ribbon for quiet some time. i’d chalked it up to the ever popular retro-chic-unironic irony thing that is so popular with the kids these days and thought it would die a quick, inevitable death with a nod in the “the hipster handbood”, but it’s still growing in popularity. and now, pabst is apparently trying to figure out how to grow in a market that has adopted the brand presumably because it hasn’t done much marketing for 20 years:

“In theory, a company that discovers one of its products has started growing of its own accord could simply do nothing. But it’s hard to do nothing. Especially for marketers. For P.B.R. it was clearly important to at least appear to be doing as little as possible. This is one reason that a traditional response to the discovery that ”alternative people” were buying the beer in Portland — taking out ads on local alt-rock stations — was nixed. It’s one reason that when Kid Rock’s lawyer came sniffing around to work an endorsement deal, Pabst said no. It’s one reason that the company has passed on the chance to back a major snowboarding event or to sponsor an extreme athlete. It’s one reason that even upbeat five-year plans for where the brand may go envision no television advertising at all.”