If you’ve been around the industry for a while you either have a story or you have heard one of many stories of how Coors Light got its name, “The Silver Bullet.” I have heard dozens of stories from the brewery and wholesalers from coast to coast regarding how the name came into being. Well, as you can guess, I have one, too.
Coors opened South Texas in March of 1976, and during this time I helped get San Antonio up by running the sales department at Coors NE. Once the market settled down (about six months after opening), we had achieved a 13% share. Schlitz was a strong #1, but Miller Lite had been introduced to the market several years earlier and was making headway. Coors decided to test their new light beer “Coors Light” in San Antonio. We rolled it out in mostly off premise stores with little success. In a very short time we found that the package design, which was the same color as the Banquet can, got lost in the cooler! The consumer couldn’t tell the Light from the Banquet. Coors, too, became aware of their error, and within six months had redesigned the package to the current silver/red look and the brand started growing.
Coors NE sold in the spring of 1978, so I moved to Wichita and began running Coors of Kansas. I had gone from a market where Coors had 13% share, to one where we had a 60% share! By now, Coors Light had passed its testing phase and the brewery decided to introduce the beer throughout its territory, which included Kansas. Because of our dominate market share, we had no problem getting distribution. AB, however, decided to introduce Busch at the same time in an effort to blunt the Coors Light roll out.
AB had targeted the college accounts around Wichita State University for Busch. My sales manager, Larry Bell, who had spent his entire professional career at CKI, took Coors Light 8-ounce cans (multiple sizes were legal in Kansas at the time) and used them as the targeted package for the same college accounts that AB was going after. Larry’s first attempt was naming the promotion “Coors Light Grenades,” which was actually quite successful. The kids really got into this promotion, but during the middle of it, Larry and some of the kids started using the cans as “bullets.” Larry jumped on the Lone Ranger and the “Silver Bullet”. Obviously, the college kids loved it, as did all the bar owners, so the brand was off and running. Busch never got established at that time.
The brewery heard about the promotion, and the “Silver Bullet” name, and let us know they did not approve the name and discouraged us from using it. That worked well, didn’t it? Now look at Coors today. One of the great success stories in our industry over the last 40 years has been Coors Light and much of that success is because of the name “Silver Bullet.” I was glad to be part of the early years and development of the brand, but I have always considered Larry Bell as the one who named the “Silver Bullet.”
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