Industry Insight | Something Massive

Industry Insight: What’s Really Going On With Beer?

The Beer Institute reported in 2008 that Americans drink more beer on the 4th of July than any other day of the year. Seems like a good time to kick off a series of blog posts about digital marketing and beer! My colleagues and I know a thing or two about the sauce. Not because we like to tie one on (although we’ve done that maybe just once or twice) but because we spent several years as the primary digital agency (DNA Studio) over at the King of Beers, Anheuser-Busch. So I’m going to devote a couple of summer posts to beer marketing and digital marketing’s role in it.

According to the Beer Institute, beer is the #1 most popular alcoholic beverage in America and accounts for roughly 85% of the total alcoholic beverages sold each year. That seems like great news if you are in the business of selling beer. But the trouble is not the volume, it’s the trend. Industry shipments were down 4% last year, including the craft sector. In a recent article from AdAge, Harry Schuhmacher, the publisher of Beer Business Daily said this about beer sales at food, convenience and drug stores:

“I’ve never seen so much red ink on a spreadsheet in all my years in this business. It’s really disconcerting.”

Ouch. In fact, craft breweries and cheaper brands are the only areas that are seeing any sort of growth. This is putting remarkable pressure on Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors whose top brands Bud Light, Coors Light and Miller Light, have typically led their sales.

The beer companies are quick to blame the economy. But call me crazy (and I’m not basing this in any kind of data here) but when you are out of a job, aren’t you maybe a little MORE apt to grab a 6-pack at the convenience store to while away the hours? Regardless of that particular insight, I think there’s something else going on here.

These large brands as mass brands. They were designed to appeal to a wide audience. But “mass audiences” are a thing of the past. I can remember learning about using aspirational tactics to drive marketing appeal when I was in college. Nowadays, the trick is realizing that many people aspire to be a little bit unique. Or at least to have an “in” that makes them more interesting to or differentiated from their peers or a taste that is a little more defined and specific. I think that’s partly why the remaining beer drinkers are bringing those craft brews to the party rather than being the guy who shows up with a 12-pack of Bud Light.

That’s probably why the new products divisions of A-B and MillerCoors are working overtime, developing brand extensions and craft-like brands and flavors. But are they not using the same mass techniques to market the stuff? Take Bud Light Lime and Bud Light Golden Wheat. Sort of different but sort of the same too, right?

We spent a lot of time helping A-B bring new products to the market in the mid-2000′s. And although every single product didn’t explode, we helped with some of the most successful new product launches at the time including Bacardi Silver and Michelob Ultra. Sort of ironically, one of our tactics was something we called webmaster relations. We’d reach out to webmasters running sites that pertained to the niche audience of would-be believers in a given product or service and get them interested in checking out the product and our site. Sounds a lot like social influence marketing, doesn’t it? Then we ran rich media ads to appeal to those same niche audiences once the brand started to pick up some steam. And what happened? Traffic flowed in.

So what do you do if you are working in the new products division at one of the big breweries? Let people feel like they discovered the brand (don’t slap the name Bud Light on it) and put a serious social ecosystem behind it to start generating buzz. Give the brand an edge, some quirkiness, some history or a sense of mystery. Give the product the attributes that research shows it needs and then target it at a niche that has enough mass to drive your business. And then just keep working at it. Everything that advises how social influence marketing works best says to stay away from corporate speak. Stay away from mass appeal. Have a conversation. Plenty of people are have conversations about beer. Why aren’t the big beer companies participating? We’ll look at some cool examples from some of the smaller guys in future posts.