New Beer’s Motto: If You Can’t Beat ‘Em . . . : * Retailing: Anheuser-Busch is testing a new brand that closely resembles a rival’s product.

Anheuser-Busch Cos. is launching a costly Southern California test-marketing campaign for its newest product, Michelob Golden Draft, a close imitation of archrival Miller Brewing Co.’s successful Miller Genuine Draft.

The new brand may add to the proliferation of product introductions that has sliced the domestic beer market into ever thinner segments. Until this year, Anheuser had largely ignored the packaged draft category, leaving it to Miller, Coors and smaller competitors.

Analysts say Anheuser now wants to steal sales from Miller’s fastest-growing brand and isn’t worried about pride of authorship.

Like its Miller counterpart, the Michelob draft is premium-priced (that is, below the rest of the super-premium Michelob line), with a similar name, black-and-gold label, clear glass bottle, cold-filtered brewing process and slightly “sweet” flavor.

“This is as close to a ‘trade-dress’ infraction as anything I’ve seen in brewing,” said Paul Gillette, a Los Angeles-based consultant and publisher of California Beverage Hotline. He referred to a legal prohibition against copying a competitor’s products too closely.

“If people want to look at this as a proverbial copycat, then let them,” Bob Goughenour, Anheuser’s brand director for Michelob, said Thursday. “Our reaction (from test marketing to date) is that consumers are favorable to it.”

Besides, Goughenour added, “the products don’t taste anything alike.”

Miller spokesman Eric Kraus agreed, sort of. “It’s real easy to copy the outside,” he said, “but they can’t copy our flavor.”

Anheuser, which started testing the brand last April in six western cities, including San Diego and Santa Barbara, now will extend the test to all of California south of Bakersfield. A “very intense” broadcast, print and billboard campaign will begin early next month, a spokesman said, with “teaser” billboards going up within a week.

Some analysts have raised the possibility that Anheuser’s move may backfire if the new product “cannibalizes” sales from the regular Michelob line or if the lower price confuses consumers about what the Michelob name is supposed to mean.

“The consumer’s probably confused enough already with all the new brands,” said Eric Shepard of Beer Marketer’s Insights, a trade publication in West Nyack, N.Y. “A-B is not going to live or die on the success of Michelob Golden Draft, but if draft is hot, they want to cover as many bases as they can.”

Since it was introduced nationally in 1986, Miller Genuine Draft has become the No. 2 selling brand in California after Anheuser’s flagship Budweiser, Miller’s Kraus said, citing internal sales surveys.