Bud Holds Bartenders’ balls

Anheuser-Busch has decided to get personal with its latest promotional tool to promote its new, fullbodied brand, Budweiser Select, says Jon Rees

Beer is still the biggestselling and most widely consumed alcoholic drink in the US, but somewhat surprisingly, the head of Miller Brewing is apparently worried that his product has suffered some sort of sea change. Norman Adami, chief executive, said recently that Americans no longer looked on beer as one of the staples of life. “After thousands of years of compelling relevance, beer is suddenly passé,” he told a surprised audience at a recent Beer Institute meeting in Milwaukee.

According to Adami – who, let’s face it, really ought to know – beer no longer captures the imagination of the cutting-edge consumers who set drinking trends and lead fashions.

Adami’s point was that though the brewers have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing for years, they have seemingly been out-thought by the suppliers of wines and spirits who have learned to reach out to consumers on a more innovative, more personal level.

Adami’s rivals at Anheuser- Busch, America’s biggest brewer which sells about half of all the beer sold in the US, agrees with him. Executives from that firm admit that they need to do a better job of making a “personal connection” with their consumers.

Rather oddly, perhaps, it seems that the brewers have been concentrating so much on creating bigger, more expensive, broader-based television advertising campaigns that they have neglected those at the front end of any marketing campaign: the bars and bartenders who actually sell their products and talk to the people drinking them.

The wines and spirits companies, meanwhile, have certainly exploited this gap in the brewers’ armour. Upmarket bars in the kind of districts that spirits companies have identified as fashionable have long been accustomed to a parade of representatives from the distillers who are always eager to talk staff through the latest flavours and mixers and equally willing to provide help and support for themed nights featuring particular cocktails. Partly as a result, the brewers admit that the spirits industry has proved enormously effective at reviving the lost art of the cocktail.

Extreme beer

The sheer variety of drinks available from spirits (over 200 vodka varieties have been introduced in the past five years) and wine companies has proved a compelling draw for younger drinkers, who then drink less beer as a result.

The changes in the drinks market are not outrageous, but brewers do regard them as significant: over the previous six years beer’s share of the alcohol market has fallen from 56% to 53.2%, says the Distilled Spirits Council, while at the same time spirits’ share of the market has increased from 28.2% to 31.3% and wine has grown from 15.5% to 15.8%.

Brewers are learning, though, and have responded by producing a wider range of specialist drinks, often packaged, too, in ways which seem to bear small resemblance to traditional beer bottles.

There are “extreme beers” like Sam Adams’ Utopias, which has a phenomenal alcohol content of 25% and is sold in a copper decanter. It is not intended to be knocked back by the pint, but sipped as an after-dinner drink, ghastly though it sounds. The company has brewed only 8,000 bottles which, however, it hopes to sell the beer for $100 a bottle.

There are even versions of energy drinks, complete with alcohol, like Anheuser- Busch’s malt beers, BE and Tilt. These drinks also contain caffeine and, that staple product of energy drinks, guarana, and are intended to challenge traditional cocktails. They are not for the faint-hearted, either, since their alcohol content is high, at 6% to 7%, compared with 4% to 5% for standard beers. Other brewers are mixing their drinks with caffeine, too, in an attempt to crack the increasingly popular energy drinks market.

The big brewers like Anheuser-Busch are trying to reconnect with the market which they thought they knew and which has instead begun to switch allegiances right under their very noses.

Select gatherings

Take the recent introduction of Budweiser Select, a lowcalorie beer which the company describes as a more full-bodied, more intensely flavoured version of the original Budweiser; not too difficult to envisage, certainly. However, to get the message across the brewer decided to learn some lessons from its rivals in the wines and spirits industry. It decided to court the bartenders and the bar owners, the people who would actually be selling its product to the public..

So it organised “bartenders balls” in hundreds of towns and cities across the country. The key selling point for the events was hardly sophisticated: free drink for all those who were invited. Those who came – and not surprisingly the balls were very popular indeed – were also informed about the delights of Budweiser Select.

Somewhat predictably, enthusiasm for the product was significantly heightened even before the beer was launched. It was launched successfully, too, and has been credited with boosting Budweiser’s sales volumes by two per cent in the first half of the year 2005. As a result, Anheuser-Busch decided that spending several million dollars a year on television advertising was not the only way to reach consumers and the company has now decided to divert about $30m of that to use for events like the popular bartender balls.

The brewers have been trying to compete, too, with the changes to design and packaging which the wine and spirits companies have introduced. Anheuser-Busch, for instance, has reintroduced packaging and labelling from the 1920s and 1950s to give its beers a retro look. It also sells beer in aluminium bottles to make them distinctive and draw comparison with the mixers now available from the spirits companies. It has marketed Anheuser World Lager as well as Bud Select and other more standard brands partly to gain from some of the kudos associated with exotic overseas beers.

The danger, of course, is that by trying to woo a select group of primarily young, urban consumers, the brewers risk alienating their massmarket customers who have been brand loyal all their lives. Beers’ sheer everyday appeal is, one of its core strengths, as the brewers are well aware.

All the same, in the face of eroding market share, something does have to be done.

Sadly it seems that beer will continue to lose ground in the market for some years yet, but the brewers can at least take comfort from the fact that they are, at last, fighting back, with balls.