Tag: Marketing

| Advertising, Beer, Beer Marketing, Marketing

How Big Lager Lost The Plot And Developed Narcissistic Personality Disorder

As anyone who has read Man Walks into a Pub will know, my entry into the world of beer was via Big Lager.

I loved lager ads when I was growing up as a teenager.   

Later, once I was helping make those ads, I was fascinated by the tribal loyalty people had to their favourite beer brands. If you were a group of mates in your twenties, Carling or Heineken or Carlsberg was like another one of your gang, always there when all the best times happened. In research groups you sometimes do an exercise where you ask people to imagine what brands would be like if they were people at a party. Beer brands were always characterised as confident, friendly guys, witty and popular without being an arse, enjoying a drink but never getting too drunk. This guy was never the pack leader, not necessarily the most popular or pushy guy in the room, but everyone liked him.  

Things started go go wrong around 1997. Advertising regulations grew ever tighter and the funny campaigns of the eighties were no longer possible. And beer started to take itself seriously. It wanted to provide a bit of substance behind the good-natured banter. Fair enough. But the picture started to blur.  

As sales of Big Lager shifted from pubs to supermarkets, price became a more decisive factor than brand image. It was widely believed that all these brands tasted the same. Not true, but if you’re drinking your lager ice-cold straight from the can, you’d have to have a delicate palate indeed to spot the difference in flavour.   

With very similar products, preference had been shaped from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties by who had the best ads, the most likeable personality. (I once looked at thirty years worth of image research, and perceptions of which lager was the most ‘refreshing’ tracked the brand that had the funniest ads, rather than the brand that was banging on about refreshment specifically).   

By the mid-noughties, that differentiation was based on price.   

Incredibly, most shopping is still done by the wife/mother in a family. The person who buys Big Lager is usually not the person who drinks it. As the distinct personalities created by ‘Reassuringly Expensive’, ‘This Bud’s For You’, ‘I Bet He Drinks Carling Black Label’,  ‘Follow The Bear’ and all the rest receded, the lager buyer knew her fella had a set of big brands that were all OK – nothing special but fine, all as good as each other – and she knew she could buy the one that was on the best deal and he’d be happy enough.   Brewers hate offering these deals. Headlines like ‘lager is cheaper than bottled water’, whether they’re true or not, don’t do anyone any favours. Margins shrank to almost nothing. If any big brand could get away with not doing supermarket deals, they’d jump at the chance.  

So it’s completely understandable that in the last few years Big Lager has started trying to build a sense of value and worth back into brands. Beer is cheap and commoditised, so how can we make it special again?   

The strategy of putting some premiumness back into mainstream beer is a good one. The execution of that strategy, however, is starting to look pretty horrible.   

I haven’t worked on any of these brands for a long time, but I know exactly the kind of language that’s being used in meetings. I’d bet my house on the fact that most Big Lager brands have a creative brief in the system that’s about ‘creating differentiation’, ‘making lager special again,’ by ‘making the brand more iconic’ and ‘improving perceptions of premiumness’. I’ll bet they also all have research that shows you don’t do this by banging on about the quality of ingredients and provenance. These might be mildly interesting copy points, but as Kronenbourg has demonstrated recently, it doesn’t wash as your main message to a typical mainstream lager drinker, especially when the substantiation behind your claim is paper-thin.   

So what do you do?   

You create an iconic, premium image. High production values. Brand fame.    And before you know it, you turn your brand from the genial bloke at the party into an arrogant, preening narcissist.   

From Psychology Today: “Narcissistic Personality Disorder involves arrogant behaviour, a lack of empathy for other people, and a need for admiration-all of which must be consistently evident at work and in relationships… Narcissists may concentrate on unlikely personal outcomes (e.g. fame) and may be convinced that they deserve special treatment.”

    You demand to be revered, claiming outrageous titles for yourself with no justification.  

      You start telling your drinkers they’re drinking the product wrong, or using the wrong terminology. You demand they start showing some respect.

    You imagine that you are some kind of treasured prize, rather than a simple, straightforward beer.  

      You start to think you embody and represent something much bigger than yourself. 

    And lose all sense of perspective.

      On the bar, you make your fonts ever bigger – sorry, more ‘iconic’ – until punters can no longer see the people serving them and bar staff have trouble passing the drinks across the bar.   

Who do you think you are helping here? How exactly do you think you are ‘enhancing the consumer experience at the point of purchase?’      

My aim here is not to slag off any individual campaign – some of them have merits, and like I said, I understand where they’re coming from up to a point.   

My aim is to demonstrate the aggregation of so many big brands taking this approach at the same time. Brands demanding to be worshipped and respected, rather than liked and tolerated. The cumulative effect is dreadfully cold and alienating, aloof. This, for a drink that is supposedly all about the good times, about kicking back and relaxing with your mates.    Big Lager has lost its way and forgotten its place. This collective arrogance is not credible, and it’s certainly not appealing. Where’s the warmth gone? Where’s the sociability?   

Premiumness in beer is not about this kind of cock-waving, and it never was. It’s about the premiumness of the experience the beer creates – the experience for which the beer is the catalyst, not the central focus.   

Big Lager should be reclaiming its territory as the catalyst for the perfect occasion with friends. Ale is more for savouring, more introverted. Craft beer is more exploratory, adventurous and product-focused, and cider is more refreshing, but has a limit on how much of it you can drink in a session.   

Yet all these drinks are stealing share from lager. All are looking more interesting, engaging and appealing than that big lager at the moment.    Mainstream lager should be solid, dependable, and reliable, and I’m sorry if that’s not sexy enough for career marketers.   

As the Beer Marketing Awards demonstrated, in some areas – particularly social media and trade marketing, where you actually have to talk to people and deal with them on a one-to-one basis – Big Lager is doing some brilliant stuff.   

But in advertising and branding, it has collectively lost the plot. If you think your brand should be revered and worshipped by its drinkers, you need to get out of beer as soon as possible and into therapy. Or maybe Scientology. They’ll love you guys.

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Alcopop: the drink that dare not speak its name.

Where’s George Orwell when you need him?

The inventor of double speak, already one of the best writers on pubs we’ve ever had, would have loved the shenanigans happening in the drinks market today.

A couple of days ago, the BBC proclaimed ‘The quiet death of the alcopop‘.

These are – or were – alcopops.
Under the image above, they told us that the ready-to-drink, flavoured alcoholic beverage sector of the drinks market (alcopops to you or me) has halved in size since 2005. Interestingly, the decline is blamed on the tacky, garish image of the products above. Not much is said about the desire for sickly sweet, fruit-flavoured alcoholic beverages, and whether that has gone away or not.
The truth is, our desire for these concoctions is just as strong as ever. Sales of alcopops are soaring. The leading brands just don’t want you to call them alcopops, and some get angry if you do. 
A few weeks ago I wrote in my column for the Publican’s Morning Advertiser that Kopparberg and Rekorderlig, which refer to themselves as ‘premium fruit ciders’, are nothing of the sort. They are alcopops in disguise – admittedly a very fetching, stylish disguise, especially in the case of Rekorderlig, whose packaging and labels are so beautiful that it sometimes takes a mental struggle to remember how unpleasant the product was – to my palate – when I tasted it. 
And this is another alcopop.

I understand that both brands were rather angry with the PMA for printing my opinion. I don’t understand why. I based my contention that these producers are not cider simply by quoting the ingredients they list on their labels/websites.

This is also an alcopop.

Kopparberg is made from ‘naturally occurring soft water’, fruit juice, sugar, acidifier (citric acid), flavouring, and potassium sorbate.

Likewise, Rekorderlig consists of ‘fresh spring water, pear and apple wines, sugar, acids: citric acid and sodium citric, berry flavours, preservatives: E202, E220 and caramel colour.’

Cider, on the other hand, is made from apples. The character of any cider depends on the varieties of apple that are blended, just as most great wines are about the blend of grapes (you can of course have single varieties of either). Even a leading commercial cider such as Magner’s – which many cider geeks would not consider cider at all – proudly talks on its website about the 17 varieties of apple used to make it. Say what you like about Magner’s, and I don’t drink it myself, but the draught version contains more Dabinett apple than the bottle does, a specific move to compensate for the fact that it’s going to taste different when not poured over ice.

By contrast, I can find no mention of apple varieties anywhere in Kopparberg or Rekorderlig’s promotional material. Rekorderlig’s website has a tab telling you about ‘flavours’. When you click on ‘apple’, this is what it says:

“Made from the purest Swedish spring water, traditional yet modern Rekorderlig Apple Cider is best served over ice for a crisp, cool and refreshing experience.” 

IN THEIR OWN WORDS, the ‘apple-flavoured’ variant of their ‘cider’ is made from water rather than apples.

Click on the ‘history’ bit on Kopparberg’s website, and the word ‘apple’ doesn’t appear once. Instead it talks about the minerality in ‘Koppaberg’s lakes and waters’, which proved inspirational to Kopparberg’s first ‘brew master’. Cider is not ‘brewed’. And once again, cider is made from apples. Not water.

It’s sad that we have such a lax regulatory environment that these alcopops are allowed to get away with calling themselves ciders. They do so, of course, because cider is so much more fashionable these days than any kind of flavoured alcoholic beverage.

But this post is not just about faux ‘fruit’ ciders – the current alcopop boom is much broader than that.

This, too, is an alcopop

Jeremiah Weed has had a brilliant launch. Again, it looks and feels too posh to be called an alcopop, but as a ready-to-drink, flavoured alcoholic beverage, that’s exactly what it is. It reeks of authenticity and heritage. In fact it has none whatsoever – it’s entirely a creation of 21st century Big Marketing. That aside, at least it doesn’t claim to be a different kind of product from what it is.

Or that’s what I thought – until the second comment below from eatingisntcheating.blogspot.com alerted me to this news story from last month – it seems Jeremiah Weed is now a cider too! In the company’s own words, although this product:

This is an alcopop, also

has not changed from when it was launched as a ‘ginger brew’, it is now, apparently, a ‘Kentucky style cider brew’. (Remember, cider isn’t brewed. At all.) And why have they pulled off this astonishing feat? Why have they changed one type of product into a completely different type of product, while not changing the product AT ALL? Why, “to help consumers, retailers and bar staff to better understand the brand’s exciting and innovative offering and [entirely fictitious] Kentucky heritage” (my italics). That’s right: they’ve started calling something a cider that isn’t a cider and didn’t used to be called cider to help people better understand what it is.

And then there’s the recent summer sensation: Crabbies ginger beer.

This is a tricky one, because ‘ginger beer’ is a recognised style of drink. You could get into an awful lot of semantics here because a true ‘ginger beer’ is brewed from a combination of ginger, sugar, water, lemon juice and a bacteria called ‘ginger beer plant’, and this fermentation process produces alcohol. But while it may be called ‘beer’, it resembles what we commonly understand as ‘beer’ in no way whatsoever – it has a completely different base of fermentable sugars and flavour ingredients from any beer. In terms of ingredients and process, it looks a lot more like an alcopop. And that’s assuming Crabbie’s is brewed in the traditional way – which it isn’t.
This is – oh, you get it by now.

But this ambiguity has now led to something truly absurd, something which makes the whole long-drinks market look utterly farcical, even more ridiculous than water-based ‘ciders’. Here’s the trade ad for Crabbie’s that ran on the back of the Publican’s Morning Advertiser last week:

I don’t know what the hell this is, but it’s certainly not a premium ale.

A cloudy alcoholic lemonade. Haven’t we had these before? Oh yes, they were the original alcopops weren’t they? Before the riot of different flavours came along. Surely there is no argument whatsoever that this is an alcopop.

But no: look at the second bullet point down: on the basis that ginger beer could be confused with actual beer, Crabbie’s claims to be not an alcopop at all, but a premium ale. That’s right: an alcoholic lemonade is classed as being the same kind of product as Fuller’s London Pride, Thornbridge Jaipur, and any other ale between 4.2% and 7% ABV.

Alcopops are enjoying a boom to rival anything they saw in the mid-90s, but they’ve learned their lesson and are now seeking to establish a credibility that will allow them to outlive the natural ‘fad’ life cycle they enjoyed last time. Because they do not have any intrinsic credibility of their own, the leading brands are stealing it from beer and cider, ashamed to admit what they really are.

A lot of people like them and that’s fine – not everything has to be crafted and balanced in flavour. But by claiming to be something they are not, they displace other products that have some integrity, increase confusion among paying punters, and denigrate the image of the drinks they are masquerading as.

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Greene King and Bombardier to go head to head on the telly

Real ale is about to burst onto our screens in a big way.

The week before last, two of the UK’s biggest ale brands launched their new advertising campaigns to beer writers and trade journalists.  I was invited to one launch but, for some reason, not the other one the day after – even though seemingly everyone else who was at the first one was.  Please believe me that this in no way colours what I’m about to say about these two campaigns.  I’m bigger than that.  No, really, I am, honest.  But I tell you this so you can filter the following for any perceived prejudice.

Anyway, I used to work in advertising so this, for me, is in part going back to the day job.

The second event – the one I wasn’t invited to – was launching the next wave in the new campaign for Well’s Bombardier.  Now, I get the feeling that I’m going to come across as disliking this development a lot more than I actually do, so let me say some positive things about it first, and hopefully this will prevent a hit squad being despatched from Bedford – home of William Charles Bedford, ‘your dashing hero on the battlefield, with a caddish twinkle in his eye,’ according to the press release (I am at least still on their email distribution list – at least until they read this.)

Basically, what they’re doing is extending the campaign they launched last year, with Rik Mayall playing the Bombardier, drinking the beer and extolling its virtues with what Well’s & Youngs clearly hope will become a pub catchphrase: ‘Bang on!’  They’re going for a heavyweight promotion on Dave, the channel for blokes who like repeats of the programme Stewart Lee refers to as ‘Mock the Weak’.  Ten and fifteen second idents will frame peak time programmes.  I haven’t seen the idents because like I said, I wasn’t invited to the launch, and didn’t get to meet Rik Mayall, but the press release says ‘viewers can expect to see the Bombardier’s take on the English sense of humour, values, our love of pubs and our social habits.’

They’re spending £5m on this, which is great news for Bombardier and great news for ale too.  It’s the highest ever spend they’ve put behind the brand (but not the highest ever spend in the ale category, as the press release falsely claims).  Whatever your views on the beer and the campaign, this is brilliant because it helps propel ale into the mainstream, makes it more visible and more contemporary.  When I do focus groups, many people assume that if a brand is on telly it must be good, must be doing something right, and this leads to greater social currency.  So here Bombardier are helping ale look more modern (with some caveats, below).  It’s also a great sign of confidence – they wouldn’t spend this money if they didn’t think cask ale was in good shape and people were ready to consider it.

Secondly, they’ve got with the programme and done a Facebook page and taken the Bombardier on to Twitter, extending a true brand property and providing content which people can interact with.  That’s a good thing as far as marketing, brand building, and the saliency of real ale is concerned.

But.

For me, this entire campaign feels like it’s aping lager ads of the seventies and eighties, and even lagers don’t behave like that any more.  Rik Mayall is reprising a character he played in Blackadder thirty years ago, in a slightly less funny way than it was then.  Is this really the way to make ale feel fresh, contemporary and appealing to new generations of drinkers?

To make my own mind up, I followed the link to the youtube channel at the bottom of the press release I was sent.  And I got this:

Woof woof! Bang Off, chaps!

The ads launch 16th April and run from 9pm to midnight weekdays for twelve months.

The other campaign is from Bombardier’s rival, Greene King.  Disliked by many readers of this blog and diehard ale drinkers in general, scorned for bland beers and nicknamed ‘Greed King’ for their sometimes voracious business practices, booed when they were runner-up Champion Beer of Britain a few years ago, they can sometimes come across as difficult to love, and have clearly been doing a bit of soul searching.

I think the results are a pleasant surprise.

Greene King IPA is the UK’s biggest cask ale brand.  It still only has a 7% market share – the diversity and fragmentation of the ale market is (most of the time) one of its main strengths. But GK IPA is, for better or worse, still the biggest brand.  I don’t tend to drink it myself, but clearly lots of people like it.  And like Magner’s does with cider, if it attracts people to real ale for the first time who then start to look around and trade up, that’s no bad thing.

In marketing theory, one classic strategy for the brand leader is to do a job that grows the whole market rather than trying to steal share form your competitors.  The theory is that if you’re already the biggest, advertising what’s good about the whole market means you benefit everyone else, but if the market grows proportionately then you’ll gain more in volume terms than everyone else does.  Most new entrants to any market tend to go for the biggest brands, so you’ll probably grow disproportionately, benefiting everyone but, most of all, yourself.

This is the strategy GK has chosen, and I think it’ll paid off.

They’ve created an ad that quite simply celebrates the joys of good cask beer in a good pub – not the joys of hops and malt and yeast, but the moment that beer – and only beer – can create.

This has always been what’s excited me most as a writer, and it’s lovely to see a brand that has wonga to spend and an ad agency with creative skill taking this aspect of beer and celebrating it.  It’s an ad for the pub as much as it is an advert for beer or Greene King IPA specifically, and I think it’s rather fucking wonderful:

I particularly like the opening, in the cellar – just enough beer craft for the mainstream viewer without getting too technical or boring.  Even if you don’t understand what you’re seeing, you get the impression of craft and care, the sense that this is something a bit more special than what you can buy in the supermarket.

The ad was shot in the Hornsey Tavern, north London, and the music is by a precocious eighteen year-old called Jake Bugg, who is to my ears like Ed Sheeran, only good.  The gaffer is an actor, but many of the people are real punters, sharing real beer moments.  The finished ad has been culled from about five hours of footage, the film crew just passing through the pub as people relaxed and shared a good time having a beer.  It’s the kind of positive image of beer and pubs the whole industry sorely needs more of.

GK is spending £4m behind this, and it’s breaking on 14th and 15th April, during the FA Cup semi-finals on ITV and ESPN.  It’s also going to be on Sky and Dave.

Coinciding with this, they also launched two new beers under the Greene King IPA brand: IPA Gold, a 4.1% golden ale, and IPA reserve, a 5.6% rich, mellow, fruity ale.  For anyone who drinks or works in a Greene King pub, these beers are welcome additions.  The golden ale is a golden ale, no better or worse than many in the market just now, while the reserve is in Fullers ESB territory, and dangerously drinkable.  They won’t set RateBeer alight, but they’re not meant to – that’s not what they’re for.  But they are quite drinkable beers that bring Greene King’s portfolio a bit closer to what drinkers want.

My only, obvious, quarrel is that, already under fire for calling a 3.6% session beer IPA, they’ve now brought out two new beers that are very different from the original, obviously not India Pale Ales in any shape or form, and called them India Pale Ales.  This reveals that as far as Greene King is concerned, IPA is a brand name and not a beer style.  I could just about defend the mainstream GK IPA because while it’s not a traditional IPA, IPA is an evolving style and in the mid-twentieth century this is what it was to most brewers and drinkers in the UK.  But by calling these new beers IPA rather than just ‘Greene King Blonde’ or ‘Greene King Reserve’, GK have created a needless rod for beer enthusiasts to beat them with – a silly own goal at a time when they’re doing some big things right.

GK has also launched an attractive Facebook page to support the campaign.

One tip to both brands: Facebook is an interactive medium.  If people ask you if it’s possible to buy Bombardier in North America or who did the music on the IPA ad, it’s good manners and good business sense to reply.  Don’t fall into the trap of bigger brands who pretend to be there on Facebook but don’t actually read or respond to comments, thereby actively alienating some of your biggest fans.  oh hang on – EDIT – GK actually did respond.

I’m anticipating many tiresome comments about how both these beers are shit, boring and bland, made by big corporations, and that it’s a bad thing they’re on TV.  My answer to that would be that these beers, and these ads, are not aimed at people who write beer blogs and drink in craft beer bars.   We’re fine – we don’t need to be told that real ale is a decent drink or that pubs are nice places to be.  No one who is already drinking great craft beer is going to suddenly start switching to Bombardier or Greene King IPA as a result of these ads.  The useful job that big brands can do is bring more novices into ale for the first time – and remind people how great pubs are.  With nearly £10m being spent advertising real ale over the next few months, this is fantastic news for beer as a whole – whatever you choose to drink yourself.

Cheers to both of them.  Especially the second one.

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China, crap ads, good pubs and Depeche Mode – my recent trade press rants

I’m very chuffed to have secured two regular trade press columns this year: a fortnightly one in the newly merged Publican’s Morning Advertiser, now the only magazine for the UK pub trade, and a monthly one for www.Just-Drinks.com , the website for the global drinks industry.

Both these columns appear online and each time they do, I put a link to them on Twitter.  But not everyone reads Twitter, so here’s a brief summary of what I’ve been writing about recently, which you can read if you like.  They’re quite industry focused, but then, you might be too.  You don’t have to read them if you’re not.  You don’t have to read them at all.

[Update: It seems Just Drinks might require a subscription to read.  PMA definitely doesn’t].

I kicked off in Just Drinks by talking about what’s gone wrong with beer advertising, and why brewers want to make bogus claims for their products.

Next month, I wrote about the beer scene in China, and how Western brewers need to be careful setting up shop there.

After that, prompted by a Carlsberg relaunch, I wrote about why beer is different from other products if you’re trying to build global brands.

And last month, I railed against the dodgy practice by some brewers (well, one in particular) whereby if you’re an employee of the company, drinking someone else’s beer – even if you’re off the clock and on your own time – can be “a career-ending move”.

My latest rant – familiar to any long-term readers of this blog – will be about the factual fallacies of the neo-prohibitionists, and how the drinks industry is failing to combat them.  It should be up any day now.

Over at the PMA, concerns are a bit more UK-focused, and there’s room to occasionally be a touch more irreverent.  Not all my columns are available online but they’ve started putting them up over the last couple of months.  In the first one that’s up there, written just before the first UK beer bloggers conference, I tried to explain to the British pub industry why they need social media.

Following that, I wrote about the basic quality of pubs, and what hardcore beer drinkers really mean when they describe a pub as ‘the kind of place you could bring the wife’.

Next, I had a go at PubCo M&B for their ludicrous decision to boot out the tenants of the wildly successful Engineer in Primrose Hill, and also used it to say something about the way many of us approach issues in beer and pubs.

And then, I wrote a piece I really hope no one takes seriously – you never know – about the glory that is Tallinn’s Depeche Mode bar.

Finally, the PMA also asked me to compile my 50 favourite UK beers – that was the brief, so I was unable to include foreign beers.  I attempted to go as wide as possible, and include selections that would upset – sorry, delight – as many people as possible.

Hope there’s something you enjoy. If there’s anything, global or local, you think I should be covering in these columns, please drop me a line.

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So last night I came across Stella Black…

Oh no, not another post about Stella and its sinister clownish owners A-B Inbev.

Why do I do it?  Why do I care?  Why do I obsess about this particular mass market, tasteless lager more than any other?

A few reasons:

  • It’s responsible for my entry into the world of beer – I started writing about beer when I was advertising Stella, so there’s a past history, an historical fondness.
  • I don’t just write about craft beer, I write about all beer – and Stella is one of the biggest beer brands in the UK.
  • It could have been so much better than it is if it didn’t keep making such spectacular business errors – it could have been a gateway between mainstream and ‘interesting’ beers.
  • Even by the standards of mainstream, industrial lager, it’s so bad I’m drawn back to it with morbid fascination – it’s a slow motion car crash.  I find Foster’s undrinkable, but aligning with comedy and resurrecting Alan Partridge was an inspired move to make the mainstream drinker a bit fonder of it.  Carling is bland and tasteless but its ‘You know who your mates are’ campaign has produced some of the best classic beer ads for nearly twenty years.  Heineken is mainstream and dull and always gets its advertising wrong, but whenever I taste it, I have to acknowledge that it’s a well made beer.  But Stella… it’s becoming a textbook case study in marketing failure, as well as a shocking example of how to devalue a once OK beer.  (I know some people like the French Riviera advertising and the Draught Masters thing got some praise, so maybe I’m being unfair. But read on.)
So I was in a Nicholson’s pub last night, and spotted the Stella Black font.  
What was I expecting?  Was I anticipating an amazingly complex beer?  Something that aficionados like me would love?  No.  I wasn’t expecting it to be great.  But having learned that it’s brewed with Saaz hops, coriander and orange peel, and having seen quite attractive press shots like this:
I was starting to suspect that it might at least be drinkable, that it might be one of those beers you could have in a pub where there are only mainstream, mass market brands available.

Is it aimed at me?  No.  But according to A-B Inbev, it is aimed at drinkers of “world beers” such as San Miguel, Budvar, Peroni. Not the most flavourful lagers (Budvar aside), but perfectly drinkable and decent quality, bought by people who want something that’s just a little more interesting than tasteless mainstream lager.

Also, as the beer is being restricted to the on-trade and is being sold in “hundreds, not thousands” of pubs, with bespoke training for bar staff, all intended to create a premium drinking experience, I was expecting the presentation to be pretty good even if the beer wasn’t – just look at that lovely photo above.
So I was surprised to see that in one of these handpicked pubs, this special, super premium beer looks like this on the bar:
No special font.  Just an ordinary tap along with all the other ordinary brands on the bar.  And look at the design.  A-B Inbev have some research that says people don’t think it’s a dark lager, even though everyone I’ve spoken to about it thinks it is a dark lager.  So confident are A-B Inbev that NO ONE will mistake Stella Black for a dark beer, they’ve made it look an awful lot like Guinness – the darkest mainstream beer there is.  
Now look closer, what are those words on the font?
“Matured for longer”.  That’s the main point on which they’ve chosen to sell this beer.  Nothing wrong with that – except they refuse to reveal how long the beer is actually matured for.  Several writers – including me – have asked what the maturation period is.  It’s the first question any competent writer would ask after being sold ‘matured for longer’ as a claim.  But A-B Inbev responded that this information was confidential.  It’s matured for longer – but we won’t give you any indication of what that means.   
OK, well, it’s a super premium lager.  At least it’s going to be served in an attractive glass, right?  Wrong.  Here’s my Stella Black:
 
So, handpicked bars, super-premium image, going up against the likes of Peroni which can charge over £4 a pint because it has a font two feet high and is served in a beautiful, unique glass.  And we’ve got a standard font, an anonymous glass, confusing brand imagery, and a product claim they refuse to tell you about.  Is any of this the pub’s fault?  We know how unreliable bar staff are.  Well, no.  It’s currently only in handpicked outlets that they really trust.  They said so.  And every other beer in the pub was being served appropriately in its branded glassware.  A-B Inbev have chosen to present the beer to you in this way.
So what’s it taste like?  I told you my expectations weren’t that high, but I was prepared to be open-minded.  Well.  No aroma whatsoever.  I don’t know what they did with the Saaz hops, coriander and orange peel, but they didn’t put them in this beer.  It’s so long since Stella has seen whole Saaz hops perhaps no one at the brewery knew what they were and they made a weird, bitter salad with them instead.  
The taste has a very brief flash of malty sweetness, then a chalky dryness that disappears almost instantly, and that’s it – until the unpleasant aftertaste starts to build after a few sips.  Then you need another beer to get rid of that.  Stella Black is one of those special, rare beers that manage to be both tasteless and unpleasant.  A beer that’s merely tasteless we can all understand, but this?  It’s like a 4.1% standard lager with a weird, Special Brew type finish.  The worst of all worlds.  Utterly undrinkable.
It fascinates me, the extent to which this once great brand can fall so far short of my expectations, no matter how low they are.  If the whole “we’re calling it super-premium but serving it in a standard fashion, calling it black but making it blonde, making longer maturation our main claim but then refusing to talk about maturation period” brand concept was presented by a bunch of hopeful 21 year-old graduate recruits on a final interview day workshop, they wouldn’t get a job in any agency I’ve ever worked with.  And if the beer was tasted blind in any competition I’ve judged, you’d either think it had a fault or was a nasty industrial, chemical concoction from the Balkans.        
One final joke – when coming up with the name for the beer, they obviously failed to get the internet ownership of it. www.stellablack.com takes you to this lady’s website:
Now that’s tasty.

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Mainstream lager makes decent ad

Kronenbourg’s advertising strategy has, over the years, always seemed a little lost to me – like the brand doesn’t really know what it wants to be.   It’s arty – or maybe not.  It’s French – OK, but does anyone care?  It’s got small bubbles in it – oh, puh-leease.

The new campaign launches this weekend, and it’s based on the idea of slowing things down.  I’m not yet convinced by this as a strategy for a mainstream premium lager – it feels more like ale or stout territory.  But as this is what I used to do for a living, I can take a decent stab at post-rationalising how they got here.

They’re not talking to bitter or stout drinkers but to people who almost always drink lager.  Lager has become commoditised, boring, indifferent an interchangeable.  It has a loutish image.  Kronenbourg is positioning itself as a more thoughtful, grown up brand.  Its French heritage allows it to do this, because French cafe culture is slower and more laid back than British pub culture.  How am I doing, BBH guys?  I’ve almost convinced myself here.

So, on to the ad itself:

French face culture is slower – just look at the effect it’s had on Lemmy (who, famously, was recently told that he had to slow down by doctors, now he’s in his sixties and suffering from illness.  His manager famously said, ‘He is slowing down – he now takes ice in his Jack Daniels’.)

The fact that Ace of Spades is a classic song and actually works well as a blues number stops the ad from becoming a cheap, one-shot joke, and the docu-realism of the way it’s shot means it cleverly navigates the thorny issue of doing slow, mellow and mature in a way that’s stylish and contemporary.

And there’s a longer, showreel version of it here:

I’m almost there on the strategy of Kronenbourg doing slow, but not quite.  But never mind that – the ad itself shows there are still great things that beer advertising can do, and I think it will be successful.

The track will soon be available to download.  You can follow the campaign on Twitter http://twitter.com/K1664slow , where they’re asking people to help pull together the ultimate slowed down playlist.

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What I did on my holidays

Post Cask Report launch, the Beer Widow and I took a much-needed week’s holiday and went to Majorca.

I’d heard that there were nice parts of it, that it wasn’t all Costa del Puke.  What I wasn’t expecting was for the vast majority of the island to be beautiful, with loads of fantastic historic towns and villages, with the seedier side of British and German holidaymaking confined to a few small strips of coastline.  It’s a wonderful place.

Beer
Admittedly it doesn’t start well, when this is what greets you even before passport control:

Oh.  Great. 
Spain has some great lagers.  They’re not finely structured Pilsners.  They don’t have a delicate nose of grassy, spicy Saaz hops.  But they come with a tight, creamy head, and they have flavour – a nice full-bodied sharp sweetness followed by a drying bitter finish.  There’s substance in the likes of Estrella and Cruzcampo.  They’re satisfying drinks.
We didn’t do much in Port de Pollensa.  We read books and sat on terraces along the unspoiled, pine tree-lined pathway along the bay shore, relaxing and gazing at sunsets like this one:
“Of course they were much better than this on board Europe you know.”
“Yes dear.”
Wary of the airport Carling ad, for the first few days I asked what the beer was whenever I ordered one, and it was always Estrella or Cruzcampo.  The latter soon emerged as my favourite, and we gravitated to the bars that served it.
And so I relaxed.  And I grew complacent.
On our fourth night we tried a new restaurant, and I just asked for a beer.  When it arrived in a Strongbow pint glass, an alarm bell started ringing in my head, but not quickly enough.  I took a mouthful of something that was thin and watery, and yet still managed to taste offensive – overly sweet and cloying, like watered down Cresta soda.  
“That’s Fosters,” I spluttered, to an eye-rolling Beer Widow.
The thing is, I can actually drink Carling.  If you haven’t yet had a beer that day, so your palate hasn’t yet been woken to the flavour profile it expects, Carling is merely bland.  It’s unremarkable but inoffensive, like a sense memory of a decent beer that you almost evoke, but not quite. Whereas Foster’s is one of those special beers that manages to be bland and actively taste foul at the same time.  I’ve never been able to understand how they do that.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was that later, when I went inside to the loo.  I walked past the bar and saw that there were two draught beer fonts: Fosters (so I had identified it correctly – get me) and next to it, Cruzcampo.
My heart sank.  Because this meant that when I’d ordered my Cerveza with a heavy English accent, the waiter hadn’t even bothered to explain that there was a choice of beers, and ask me which I would like.  He’d simply heard my accent, and assumed that I would be a Foster’s drinker.  I was English.  Therefore I would want the shit, English beer rather than the halfway decent Spanish one.  He knew this.  He didn’t even have to ask.
When I wrote about Chodovar I wondered why we Brits actively choose to drink shit quality lager.  I pointed out that well made lagers were no more challenging or difficult to get into, no less fizzy or refreshing.  They were just nicer.  Now, more depressing than that, we actually insist on taking our inferior beer abroad with us, and drinking it when there is a much nicer beer waiting there for us.  I’m sure it costs more to buy Foster’s in Spain than Cruzcampo, and there’s simply no comparison between them.  Depressing.
Booze
To cheer myself up, we went to the offie.  I was hoping to find a decent Fino or Madeira.  I failed, but we found something much better – the two best spirits brands I’ve ever seen.
First up, here’s Capitan Huk rum:

I’ve no idea who makes this.  I’m guessing it’s not Diageo.
This is one of the best brands I have ever seen in my life.  I can imagine the meeting that gave birth to it. Translated from the Spanish, it went roughly as follows:
“OK, so we’re going to launch a rum. How should we brand it?”  
“Well, the history of rum is tied inextricably with the British navy.  If we’re going to sell this to holiday-making Brits, that would be a good association to evoke.  They’re always wearing England shirts and that, so if we create a sort of naval ensign flag that combines the Union Jack and the St George’s Cross we’re onto a winner!”
“Brilliant!  Let’s do it! So who shall we get to draw the label then?”
“How about my eight year old son?”
“Brilliant!  Does he know what the Union Jack looks like?”
“No.”
“OK, but given that we’re investing a sizeable amount of money in launching a new brand, should we at least perhaps give him some visual reference so he gets it at least partly accurate?”
“No, fuck it, I’ll just describe vaguely what a Union Jack looks like, and then invest several thousand Euros in printing up the first thing he comes up with.”
“OK, cool.  So what about a name?  Something English and naval…”
“How about Captain Hook?”
“Wasn’t he a pirate in a children’s story, and therefore both fictitious and absolutely nothing to do with the British navy?”
“Yes.”
“Ok, works for me.”
But Capitan Huk was not the best brand in that offie.  Oh no.  The best brand, high on the top shelf, out of reach without the use of a stepladder, was this muscular bad boy:
It says ‘Viking Ship’ on the bottom.  In case you don’t know what the drawing is.

LARSEN, the cognac of vikings.

The very concept of a ‘cognac of Vikings’ is wrong in so many different multi-layered ways, the person who dreamed it up can only be genius.

Every single part of the execution of that concept reinforces the original wrong-headedness of it.

The random inclusion of ‘fine champagne’ just to reinforce the quality cues.

Labelling it with ‘Viking Ship’ like a child would label his drawing.

‘Le Cognac des Vikings.’

I’m in mourning that I didn’t go out and get a stepladder and buy this, just so I could look at it every day when I needed to smile.

Sparkly hat
Anyway we had a great holiday, even if we did have to fly Ryanair.  At the airport on the way home we, along with a long, snaking queue of other budget holiday makers, used unstaffed check-in desks to weigh our bags and repack them to stay within the airline’s draconian baggage weight restrictions.  Here and there, items were discarded.  And in one waste bin, about half an hour’s queuing away from the one check-in desk Ryanair deigned to open, we saw this:

Majorca.

At some point, the glittery cowboy hat has replaced the Kiss-Me-Quick policewoman’s hat in British holidaymaking law, quickly and completely.  If a picture paints a thousand words, this one tells you the story of a thousand Mediterranean holidays, encapsulated perfectly.  The object itself.  The fact that it’s been discarded.  The fact that it was only discarded minutes before check-in.

Did its owner intend to take it home then change her mind? Or did it symbolise her holiday, and was she clinging to that holiday till the last possible second?

Did she think “Oh I can’t be arsed to take this on board now I think about it,” or did she think, “I can’t bear to part with you, and all that you represent.  But I must.  For tomorrow I have to go back up Tesco’s.”

The tanlines fade.  But the pint of Carling will always be there for us.

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How to sell barley wine

If you’re interested, here’s the text of my speech from the Guild of Beer Writers seminar last Monday – it seemed to go down pretty well.

The best book on marketing I ever read was called Positioning: the battle for your mind. It was the best book because it contained one simple idea. It repeated this idea over and over again, with countless examples, until you got it. And it’s an idea that can help you sell anything worth selling. Basically, the idea is this: the way the human brain works, when we are introduced to a new thing or idea, we automatically try to make sense of it by filing it in our brains next to things we already know. We understand it by relating it to things we’re deeply familiar with. The first cars were known as horseless carriages. Television was like radio, but with pictures. And Seven-Up launched in the United States as ‘the uncola’. In each case, the product is defined – positioned – against a product that’s already familiar. Think about when we write tasting notes for beers – the best way to describe an American IPA to a wine lover is to compare it to a Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc. Imperial porters are “vinous”. And who can say they don’t regularly describe the combination of hops, barley, yeast and water as chocolatey, fruity or biscuity? The term ‘barley wine’ is a classic piece of positioning thinking – we know what wine is. It’s made of grapes. This is wine that’s made from barley. Of course, technically its beer, not wine, but if a potential drinker, never having heard of it before, hears this phrase, they can decode a lot of product information from it. It’s going to be strong in alcohol and in flavour. It should be sipped and savoured from a small glass, not drunk in pints. It’s going to come in a 750ml bottle, designed for sharing, that’s going to look great and cost a lot of money and be suitable on a dinner table and… oh hang on. It’s quite interesting to see where the analogy breaks down, isn’t it? The very name, barley wine, sets accurate expectations about what the product will deliver. But not about what to expect from how it will be packaged and sold. And there’s another problem: if you say ‘barley wine’ to older drinkers, they have another concept in their heads which means they don’t actually get to wrestle with the metaphor of the name to unlock those rich associations. To them, barley wine is rocket fuel, cheap and nasty, something that was around in the seventies. To win them over, you need to do something that breaks the association between the term and the drink they used to know. The solution to both is simple enough: a different approach to presentation and packaging. If you package a very strong beer in the same type of bottles in which you package ordinary beer, give it a similar name and labelling, and sell it at a not too dissimilar price point, people are going to think that it’s like other beer – carrying the same associations, to be drunk in the same fashion. This is why people think of an 8% beer as insanely strong when they’re perfectly happy to drink 12% wine in similar quantities. Present it in a different way, a more premium way, and people will think of it differently. Drinkers have two sets of associations in their heads: beer, and wine. Barley wine can and should play with both. A clichéd advertising proposition for barley wine would be “the beer that thinks it’s a wine”. You can immediately see the associations that conjures up. But you have to do it justice. Think about quality. Presentation. Ritual. When you get a bottle of barley wine that looks like it’s worth paying seven quid for before you’ve even picked it up, you’ve probably got it nearly right. You might not like the fact that we’re using wine as a benchmark of quality. But you have to work with what’s already in people’s heads. And it is called barley wine.

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The business of beer

Had an interesting week that’s seen me on me feet three times telling people something about the selling of good beer: on Monday I was asked to do a short speech at the British Guild of Beer Writers Barley Wine seminar. On Wednesday I was asked to present the prizes for packaging and design at the International Beer Challenge, after chairing that part of the judging (the other tables got to drink the beers – we got to look at them!) And on Thursday I was asked to make a short speech and present the overall winner of the SIBA Business Awards.

This all represents a bit of a development for me – I haven’t been asked to present anything before and it was very nice to be asked now.
I thought it was interesting that all three were linked to the marketing and selling of beer – I suppose that’s my strong point, if I have one – and that all three fell in the same week.
At the SIBA awards I said that marketing has long been a dirty word in beer circles. Because global bland brands use a lot of marketing to sell beers that have very little character, marketing itself gets the blame. But what we’re seeing now is lots of brewers starting to engage with it.
On TV, megabrands spunk more in one commercial break than the vast majority of brewers will ever have to spend on marketing in a year. But the world is changing. If you bottle your beer, everyone has the same space on which to create an attractive label. Same with a standard handpull pumpclip. On Twitter and Facebook, everyone from AB-Inbev to that bloke down the road with a one barrel plant in his garage has the same space to play with. The playing field is level in many key respects. And the big brewers will tell you that TV is less effective these days – what you need to do is get in at a grassroots level and work closely with pubs and consumers to give them something they want in a more tightly defined target audience. Smaller brewers are at least as well, positioned, if not better positioned, to do community and grassroots stuff than big brewers are.
But as more people take an interest, the standard is improving. I’m not going to name names, but there were some truly horrible beers submitted to the IBC design and packaging awards – stuff that was meant to look premium and just looked cheap and tacky, and stuff where there had been no thought given whatsoever to how this bottle was meant to persuade someone to pick it up form the shelf. There’s nothing about being a great brewer that means you’re more likely to be a great graphic designer too. And small, independent designers are all over the place, looking for ways to prove themselves and not charging the earth to do it. Getting it done properly is a very worthwhile investment.
And at the SIBA awards, we saw an awful lot of entries where a brewer had created a one-off brew with a special pump clip to help celebrate an event, or to promote awareness of a charity and give a donation from every pint sold. This is sound business practice, solid promotional thinking and proves that small brewers are worthy members of their local communities. But it ain’t award-winning stuff. The winners went further and created big ideas, put marketing and/or entrepreneurialism at the heart of their thinking rather than a bolt-on at the end.
It’s a tough market out there – there’s no reason why any brewer can’t compete on equal terms. But it’s got to be done properly. And more and more brewers are realising that.

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