How Labatt's marketing play gave birth to Jays

By Shanthal Perera

Toronto traded in its autumn colours for a sea of blue last fall as baseball captured the city’s imagination after a 25-year absence. The Toronto Blue Jays pulled off one miraculous comeback after another, until they met the Kansas City Royals in the American League Championship Series.

While the Blue Jays may have missed their fairytale end last season, their very existence is a fairytale of its own; built on a marketing exercise that had a big pay-off. At the centre of that fairytale was Don McDougall, MBA’61, who was the President of the Labatt Brewing Company between 1974-79.

In the early 1970s, Labatt Breweries was one of three major breweries in Canada. When McDougall began his presidency in 1973, Labatt was considered the weak sister to Molson’s and Carling.

But in the age before baseball analytics, the brewing industry was on top of its numbers.

“We had sales figures, by store, in every store in Ontario available to us by noon on Monday for the previous week, down to the second decimal place,” McDougall said. “So, Elliot Lake went from 33.67 to 34.29 last week. We had that kind of data.”

Labatt’s research indicated that their market share nationally was declining. With limits on price changing, promotion and advertising, the culture of the entire industry was market share. A closer look at the numbers helped Labatt pinpoint the problem to Toronto.

Their competitors had allied themselves with strong sporting brands: Molson with hockey and Carling with Canadian football. But there was a vacuum. While Toronto had a long legacy of baseball, the professional league had declined by the 1960s. Yet, just as McDougall was taking the helm at Labatt’s, talk of bringing baseball back to Toronto was starting to pick-up, led by Paul Godfrey, former Chairman of Metropolitan Toronto.

Sensing the unique opportunity, Labatt decided to associate themselves with those pursuing a baseball franchise for Toronto. However, their early successes didn’t culminate in a win. In early 1976, Toronto was hours away from securing the San Francisco Giants, but the deal fell through. McDougall and the team were devastated.

Like any sporting fairytale, the tide turned quickly. Inside three days, McDougall and Herb Solway go from a beach in Florida, to meeting owners in the National and American League in New York, to a press conference in Toronto, where Labatt announced they are pursuing an expansion American League baseball team.