Wanted: a revolution in lager advertising
Could making advertising appealing to women be the answer to stagnant lager sales, wonders Dominic Mills.
The sight of Jimmy Bullard getting his kit off for Carling – in homage to that famous shot from American Beauty – is definitely one for the lads, not the girls.
Ex-footballer Jimmy, who once graced the hallowed turf of Craven Cottage for all-too-short a time (before he became a want-away in pursuit of money and betrayed us fans), shot to national fame during last year’s I’m a Celebrity. There, he established himself as the ‘bishop of banter’, a lad’s lad…and a bit of a wuss when it came to the creepy-crawlies.
This makes him perfect for a football-themed alcohol ad where the core proposition is that the lads like nothing more than a lager-fuelled session of banter.
Entertaining as the Bullard execution is, it’s pretty much standard fare for the lager market. One thing it won’t do is attract any women drinkers.
I mention this because the boss of SABMiller had a rant last month about lager marketing.
“For many years,” Alan Clark said, lager marketing “was either dismissive of, or insulting to, women. Women [are] either not present at all or entered as the butt of the joke. Lager is associated with groups of young men…and with a high volume of consumption.”
Quite so. Why should we be surprised? As lager marketers say, “the target market don’t drink the product, they drink the ad and the joke.” Think Carling, Fosters, Heineken, Kronenbourg, Budweiser, Carlsberg…the list is endless, and some of them are SABMiller lager brands. They’re pretty much all male/lad-oriented brands. That’s where the money is.
So why should the big cheese from SABMiller get all antsy about this? Is it because he’s discovered his inner-feminist (a bit late: when wasn’t lager advertising focused on the lads?).
No, it’s because lager sales are stagnant, if not falling, so the brewers have to find some way to expand the market.
Indeed, as a recent report from McKinsey says, the brewing industry is suffering from a perfect storm. After years of volume growth, says the report, consumption has hit a brick wall and drinking patterns have changed.
Whereas perhaps women might have drunk lager, they now opt for lighter drinks such as cider and wine.
Yet at the same time, new beer and lager products are saturating the market. In the UK in 2014, according to McKinsey, twice as many new beers came to the market as in 2013. In Europe, new-product development is even faster. Many of these are niche, craft-type, beers, each nibbling away at the mass-produced froth produced by the big brewers.
So we have too little volume, and too many products.
The solution, therefore, is to find ways to bring more, and new, drinkers into the beer market – i.e. women.
Is advertising, therefore, the answer? Can the likes of SABMiller advertise their way out of this hole by appealing to women?
Carling doesn’t seem to think so, but then it is, one might say, a legacy brand with an established proposition. It would be difficult for Carling, not to say impossible, to bring women into the mix. You can’t see them attracted by the idea of an evening of banter with the ‘ladettes’. The same goes for most standard lager brands as they are currently positioned.
My man on the inside (my son, who works in the trade) tells me that creating lager advertising that appeals to women is going to be an uphill struggle. “You wouldn’t advertise Barbie dolls to a boy, would you,” he says.
Of course all kinds of issues come into play – some cultural, some contextual like the weather or the fact that women (OK, Mrs Mills) don’t like your typical sleeve glasses or tankards.
But when women do drink lager, he says, it is primarily for reasons of taste – not something that your average lager ad tries to convey, and which is difficult anyway. No-one’s that interested, even the lads, in brewing provenance, hops, malt and this cask or that.
Casting my eye over the gamut of lager advertising, I can only think of a couple of lager brands that even acknowledge the existence of women drinkers. One is Peroni (owned by SABMiller); the other is Spanish lager Estrella Damm.
Is it a coincidence that both are southern European brands where the drinking culture is very different, and consumption differences based on sex are much less than in the UK? And can it be a coincidence that both are among the fastest-growing brands in the UK?
Of course not.
So the task of creating lager brands – driven by appropriate advertising – that appeal to women can be done.
It’s just that the change is going to come from brands new to the UK – unencumbered with the type of male-oriented advertising heritage that works in this market. If they offer a taste difference too, then so much the better.
The trick is getting distribution in what we know is an increasingly crowded market. But what guarantees distribution? A decent-sized advertising budget.
Bring on the revolution.