The most interesting man in the world occasionally enjoys a beer. However, it must be a beer good enough for a man with the brute and class of his stature. He is a man’s man, in love with women and booze as he travels the globe seeking excitement. He is the Dos Equis man!
This campaign, created by Euro RSCG, promotes a persona that men aspire to, but at the same time find slight humor and amusement in as well. Dos Equis was never a popular beer, nor a good on for that matter, but it had just enough mystery in the brand to support the platform of the most interesting man in the world to take it up a few notches. This is advertisement done successfully. The agency shows the consumer something with supportive reasonable belief, and then is able to market it to a whole new ballpark: sophistication, cleverness, and class, while sporting a bit of a rough edge and rugged boldness. Essentially they created a whole new class of people. They created the most interesting man in the world and the class of people who want to be like him.
This character creation is a tool that many advertisements utilize to create an illusion that their target market can mentally relate to. The most interesting man in the world “lives vicariously through himself” as Will Lyman narrates on one of the commercial spots, but the every man lives vicariously through him whenever they drink Dos Equis. These thoughts are now associated with the brand name, activating multiple states of mind through sensorial, emotional, and cultural contexts.
Many advertisement campaigns focus to bring out their viewer’s explicit memories of such things as the simplicity of childhood games or the anxiety of a passionate first kiss to relate to their product as promising a similar feeling. This method relies on the memory of the viewer. However, the Dos Equis campaign approaches the problem from an opposite angle in presenting the viewer with explicit memories not of their own to therefore internalize and create an emotional tie with. The sensations of amazement and empowerment that the viewer gets when watching the most interesting man in the world are firing synapses that will replicate when choosing to drink a Dos Equis later in time. Emotional associations are being made. In the commercials, the character always ends with the line, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.” This ‘choice’ is also quite important to the associations being linked and the perception being formed. It insets in the mind that it is not the beer that makes this man the way he is (as so many other products try to imply), but and interesting man like this is making a choice to choose this product. It is the same choice our viewer will make, connecting the two people, as well as their memories and experiences.
Beyond these emotional ties and associations, the advertisers of the campaign utilize pattern in the formula of the commercials for mental organization. Diane Ackerman, author of An Alchemy of Mind (2004), expands specifically on this idea known as the rule of 3. We, as humans, organize our world into patterns so as to better comprehend incoming sensory information. Twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern. Ackerman goes on to say that “we’re so in love with patterns that we obsessively create our own, often in threesomes, such as morning, noon, and night; Macbeth’s 3 weird sisters; the three wise men; ready, set, go; the genie’s granting three wishes; small, medium, and large; ABCs; Goldilocks and the three bears; the three little pigs, and so on. Three seems to be our pattern on choice,” and it is in sets of three that the gathered facts of legend are told about the most interesting man in the world. “We learn what repetitions to expect,” and advertisers feed this anticipated outset by presenting in trios that do not disrupt our pattern-expecting behavior.
The creators continue to follow through with our expectations in a cultural and historical manner as well. I don’t know who comes to your mind when you see the Dos Equis man, but Sean Connery is the first association I make to this mysterious character. A classy elderly man, always composed, while being slightly bad-ass with a taunting British accent. He always plays and exciting and adventurous character in his films, the first of which comes to mind is Entrapment. “A cross between Ernest Hemmingway, Bill Murray, Burt Reynolds, Royal Tenenbaum, and Don Draper, the most interesting man in the world barkens back to a mid-century concept of what a man’s man should be.” The commercials utilize our semantic memories of history and popular culture to deepen our associations and experience with Dos Equis. As synapse patterns fire in remembrance of something, that pattern strengthens to be more easily called again, as in practice makes perfect, and by bringing forward more and more associations, Dos Equis will be on a person’s mind more often with more links.
However, as with all advertisements, the creative directors research, strategize, and manipulate familiar situations of humor, empathy, and so on to reach their target audience in the best way they feel possible. Yet in most cases, the viewer doesn’t always believe what they are told in television commercials, and the world’s most interesting man doesn’t always drink beer either. So in the associated point of the Dos Equis commercial, if you are going to drink a beer and if you are going to believe in a televised message, it mind as well be Dos Equis.
