Following a marketing campaign intended to lure beer drinkers away from their beverage of choice to Jim Beam, the leaders of the industry’s largest trade groups issued a joint statement in defense of ales and lagers.
Beer Institute (BI) president and CEO Jim McGreevy, Brewers Association (BA) president and CEO Bob Pease and National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) president and CEO Craig Purser asserted that “beer is our nation’s most popular alcohol beverage for good reason.”
“With dozens of styles and innovations, familiar favorites and new beers constantly hitting the market, there is a beer for everyone and every occasion,” they said in the statement.
McGreevy, Pease and Purser pointed to the Beers to That campaign — a consumer-facing program from the Beer Growth Initiative, a brand-agnostic coalition of all three beer industry trade groups to stem the tide of volume flowing from beer to wine and spirits — as proof of beer’s compatibility with most drinking occasions.
“As the nationwide #BeersToThat campaign reminds us, beer is the perfect alcohol beverage for celebrating life’s little moments,” the statement continued. “We have no doubt that millions of loyal beer drinkers will continue to take part in the excitement of the beer category.”
Jim Beam’s “Need a Break From Beer” campaign surmises that beer drinkers are tired of beer and invites them to try cocktails made with Jim Beam as an alternative. The TV commercial currently airing on more than 20 national networks uses the trope that beer drinkers are pretentious hipsters or out-of-touch oddballs. It comes after several years in which the beer category has ceded share to spirits.
Julia Herz, founder and owner of beverage industry consulting firm Herz Muses and former BA craft beer program director, disagreed with the commercial’s approach and wondered if it will turn off the people it’s trying to attract.
“They’re just warming up,” she told Brewbound. “If this is some of what we will continue to see for the next year, it could backfire, because it’s denigrating another beverage. And when you take on an entire category, you’re going to get a lot of muscle behind that that’s going to counteract and correct.”
The campaign is slated to run national TV ads throughout 2021 and launch pop-up outdoor activations styled after beer gardens when and where permissible by public health rules.
“Obviously they’re trying to move in and muscle in and learn from beer’s space and play in that sandbox, so that’s an interesting move,” Herz said, while noting that the COVID-19 pandemic could render those plans infeasible. “Investment in that — I’m not so sure, especially in the first half of the year, how wise that is.”
Herz added that in relying on tired stereotypes of beer drinkers, the commercial represented “old school, out-of-touch marketing” by portraying its only female characters as a server and “an outlier token geek.”
“Denigrate all you want, but approach things in a much more modern way in terms of portraying women around the experience of beverage alcohol,” she said.