Stephen Beaumont on
Beer Marketing
Cue lights and camera. The setting is a spectacular beach; white sand, palm trees visible in the distance, beautiful people playing volleyball in the background.A blond-haired adonis and his equally beautiful girlfriend walk into the frame, each holding a stalk of broccoli, and proceed to engage in numerous pleasure-filled beach activities. Action!
(Voice Over): This is it, folks, the vegetable with the taste that will stop you cold!
BROCCOLI!
It's the King of Vegetables! The one vegetable to have when you're having more than one! BROCCOLI tastes great, but is less filling! And you know that when you've said BROCCOLI, you've said it all!
You just can't miss with the green bullet, so when the day is done and you're ready to unwind, it's broccoli time! Because when nothing else will do...
Tonight, let it be BROCCOLI!
The couple walk toward the camera, smile, kiss, take a nibble at each other's broccoli, turn and walk into the setting sun. Cut!
Have you caught that commercial on your television lately, perhaps sandwiched between the innings of a baseball game? Have you been carried away by the wave of broccoli-mania that is sweeping North America, making the noble floret the best-selling vegetable on the planet? Have you sacrificed all other legumes, tubers, fungi and assorted greens so that you might devote your diet exclusively to broccoli?
Of course, you haven't!
You haven't because there is no such advertisement, no such wave of broccoli-mania and absolutely no credibility to the notion that there ever could be, either. In fact, the very idea that such a phenomenon of broccoli fever could occur stretches the limits of imagination well past the breaking point. Can you envision, for example, an ad campaign touting the "lifestyle benefits" of broccoli? Or a marketing scheme aimed at convincing North Americans to forsake all other vegetables in deference to broccoli. Or a related industry built around T-shirts, baseball caps, athletic wear, designer shorts, denim jackets, watches and fashion accessories of every description, all emblazoned with stylized depictions of broccoli and slogans promoting its consumption?
It's a crazy concept, to be sure, one scarcely deserving of consideration. So why is a beer book engaging in such a fanciful analysis of broccoli marketing? Because, as ludicrous as the above scenario appears when applied to a vegetable, it is a very real and sound strategy in North America when it comes to beer.
Style vs. Substance
This continent is home to a multi-million dollar advertising industry devoted exclusively to the art of persuading beer drinkers to stick to a single, specific brand of beer. And the agencies that make up this industry work in exactly the same way as our fictional broccoli marketer: ignore the taste (taste doesn't matter), sell the image (bigger, bolder, fresher, drier...), market the idea that "X" brand of beer will help make the consumer a better (stronger, more popular, sexier, more beautiful...) person and repeat the message as often as possible.As an argument in favour of a product, it's lunacy. As a sales and marketing strategy, it's one of the most successful in history.
It is so successful that over forty percent of all the beer sold in the United States comes from a single brewing company -- Anheuser-Busch! It is so successful that over ninety percent of all the beer sold in Canada comes from two brewing companies -- Molson and Labatt! It is so successful that the over five hundred craft breweries operating in North America at the time of writing barely make a dent in the continent's total beer market!
It is so successful that it has convinced the vast majority of North Americans that beer is "just beer."
But beer is more than "just beer." Beer is the smoky richness of a porter and the crisp bitterness of a pilsner. It is the warming depth of a doppelbock and the fruity tang of a wheat beer, the reflective complexity of a barley wine and the foresty charm of a best bitter. Beer is a quenching drink, a soothing elixir and an invigorating tonic. And still, beer is so very much more.
A Taste for Beer © Stephen Beaumont, 1995
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