Brewers tap into renewed ‘energy and momentum’ around beer to target new drinkers
Brewer and industry body group The Beer Alliance is pumping more money into media with the next phase of its ‘There’s A Beer For That’ campaign, an effort to replicate the success of its first campaign and ‘re-ignite Britain’s love of beer’ after the category finally saw growth last year.
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The Beer Alliance is hoping to turn changing attitudes towards beer into “behavioural change” with the new £5m campaign. It will increase the weight behind its media spend as it moves into cinema and digital OOH for the first time and increases its presence on VOD and social.
The campaign, which continues the message that there’s a type of beer for every person and occasion, will kick off with a TV advert as a follow-up to the campaign’s last ad, launched in October.
David Cunningham, programme director of There’s A Beer For That, told Marketing Week that the feedback since the launch of the campaign last year has been positive.
The ad also outperformed industry norms on all measures including enjoyment, engagement and propensity to purchase, according to Cunningham.
“People want to know more about beer than they currently do, such as its taste credentials, cues and food pairings,” he said, adding that while the wine category has been doing this for a long time, beer hasn’t talked about itself at a “total category level”.
“We knew that in 2015 we needed to extend the reach and awareness of those messages,” he added.
Pairing beer with food
The campaign will be promoted on social, VOD and in cinemas, as well as through digital OOH in August and September, all targeted at “evening dining occasions” in order to push the message of beer’s ties to food,
“The food angle is an important piece of the strategy as it’s an untapped occasion for beer,” Cunningham said.
The group is also evolving its #BeerMatch Twitter tool with the launch of ‘Beer Explorer’ on 1 June, a visual database of over 1,000 beers that new drinkers can navigate by selecting style and tasting notes.
It will use the same database as #BeerMatch, which gives consumers instant sommelier-recommended beers matched to food when they tweet the campaign with their chosen dish.
“It’s an ongoing tool that will increase,” Cunningham said, adding that #BeerMatch has reached 35 million consumers to date.
Changing attitudes towards beer
The Beer Alliance is made up of 58 members including global brewers such as SAB Miller, Heineken and AB InBev, national and regional brewers and pub companies such as Fullers and industry organisations including the British Beer and Pub Assocation (BBPA) and Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA).
The group launched “There’s A Beer For That” last year in the hope of tackling the challenges that have surrounded the beer category over recent years.
“It’s been seen to be lower quality than some other drinks, such as wine, and has been seen as a bit more bland,” Cunningham said. “There’s also been a narrowness around beer being dominated by male sports or lads’ nights out, or at BBQs or the beach.
“These are all interesting opportunities and we were appealing to people in those occasions, but not on a broader basis.”
Attitudes towards beer seem to be changing, with BBPA’s beer barometer at the end of 2014 showing the first growth of the category in years. Sales were up by 1%.
“That positivity is continuing into this year,” Cunningham said. “There’s an overall renaissance happening, driven by innovation and the growth of breweries. Energy and momentum is coming back into beer.”
The campaign’s off-trade promotion with Tesco last year also saw time in the beer aisle increase by 25% according to the group, which has launched a second promotion with the retailer focusing on pairing beers with BBQ foods.
“Early indications suggest that claimed purchase has been met by actual purchase,” Cunningham said. “We’re using in-store to covert attitudinal change into behavioural change at the point of consumption.”