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Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

That is some genius marketing move; although an extremely risky one. How much earned media did Maker's Mark get over this? How many people will be buying their bourbon rather than a competitors' because they "decided to do the right thing"?

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They didn't decide to do the right thing, they decided to do the wrong thing and backtracked. They've hurt their branding. They announced they were watering down their product. That hurts the image of 'high class'. To call this a PR move is to be blind to the enormous amount of backlash that has occurred due to the announcement.

In the sense that all bourbon distillers control the final ABV of their product (cask-strength bourbons being swung the opposite direction, bottled at undrinkably high ABVs so customers can dilute them to taste), the term "watered down" is both strictly true and not very descriptive.

Lots of bourbon is sold at 80 proof.

This is not a comparison of Makers Mark vs all other Bourbons, this is a comparison of Makers Mark vs literally* watered down* Makers Mark.

All bourbon is "watered down". Literally! It comes out of the barrel at an undrinkable ABV. When you say things like "literally watered down", you sound like that might be news to you.

I agree completely with this. As you point out the act is standard - but the outrage is evident in the usage of the phrase "watered down". (And it's been used repeatedly in different places across my news feeds). This means - to me at least - that they've totally lost this PR battle.

It might be riskier than you think. All my friends knew about the shortage, and their plans to water down remaining stocks. However, Maker's reversal might not generate the same buzz that their initial shortage announcement did. That leaves the casual drinkers only knowing of the watered down Makers, not the "do the right thing" Makers.

That could alleviate their shortage problem.

I can't be the only person who thought it was a PR move when I read the first story? I imagined it as something you would read on one of those copy heavy ads in an old magazine, straight out of Bernays' playbook.

How many people will be buying their bourbon rather than a competitors' because they "decided to do the right thing"?

How many people will be buying a competitor's bourbon because Makers "decided to do the wrong thing" and now, short of nontrivial research, one doesn't know what's in the bottle now?

There are a lot of other bourbons on those upper shelves.

And I still don't buy Belkin products because of that "replace random web-page requests with ads" router fiasco years ago.

not sure about the 'decided to do the right thing' part, but knowing supply's tight makes me want to go pick-up a few cases right now.

..which, of course, would only be making the problem worse, so i don't think it’s a marketing ploy as high demand is the issue here.

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