The Spirit World

If you watched the Superbowl (I didn’t), you might have seen the new “Here’s to Beer” commercial from the Beer Institute paid for with money “donated” by Anheuser-Busch. If you missed it (I did), the commercial is playing on the opening page of the Here’s to Beer web site. It’s actually pretty good. It was so moving I cried, but not in my beer.

The beer industry thinks that falling profits might have to do with beer’s image as a lower class drink. Anheuser-Busch now wants to undo all the damage done from years of beer ads with farting horses and slimy frogs, and presumably all those sexist ads where women’s scantily-clothed bodies where shamelessly used to entice men into… what? buying yet another six pack of Bud. Even though I’ll miss the Swedish Bikini Team, it’s nice to think that A-B intends (for the moment) to give it’s beer a classier image.

So who does A-B think isn’t buying its beer anymore? According to Realbeer.com:

When Anheuser-Busch executive Robert Lachky began promoting the idea for this effort last fall he said, “Remember, the enemy is hard liquor and wine.” He outlined a four-prong consumer campaign that would center on the social value of beer, the “romance” of the product, viewing beer differently and the health benefits of beer. [see Realbeer.com’s Beer Therapy blog, the post is called “More on beer’s image“]

Hey, I enjoy a good mixed drink and a glass of wine every once in a while; they aren’t the enemies of beer. But perhaps any beer that isn’t A-B beer is the enemy. I’m more likely to grab an ale from Long Island’s own Blue Point Brewery than a Bud which means that I’m contributing to A-B’s falling market share.

Why the combative stance with respect to liquor and wine and, presumably, craft brewed beer? Only in the war for market share do products become combatants, muscling at each other to get people’s attention. And isn’t it this drive to get attention that reduced A-B and the like to farting-horse marketing in the first place? A-B has reduced their beer to a mere product and as a results has forgotten that real people drink beer. We are not mere consumers — injesters and digesters of “the product” — or more importantly subsidizers of product manufacturers. We have taste and preference and passions. Some of us don’t even believe what advertisers tell us.

Jay Brooks writes in his Brookston Beer Blog that the “Here’s to Beer” campaign

…reeks of corporate desperation to get the share price up and little else. Frankly, I don’t believe that Anheuser-Busch is capable of extolling beer’s virtues simply because they stopped thinking of Budweiser as beer decades ago, if not longer. Like most large corporations, they sell a product. It could be widgets and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The business is about numbers and in particular that those numbers must keep climbing… no matter what. [quoted from “Here’s To Beer — Here’s to Making it Appear Relevant and Appealing“]

Mr Brooks goes on to say:

There’s really no incentive for A-B to be truthful or do anything that might really educate consumers about beer, especially since most “truth” about beer reflects rather poorly on the food product they produce that they then pass off as beer. [ibid]

It’s not that beer is declining in popularity or perceived sophistication; it’s the industry version of American Light Lager that’s falling out of favor. A-B wants to save it’s version of beer. If A-B is really interested in its beer, they should start by giving their lager more malt and hop character. Hey, why not brew an American style IPA? When the beer actually tastes like something people want to drink, then people might actually drink it.