The fact is, I’ve often made fun of Budweiser myself. Even though it was one of the first beers I ever consumed, there is no sense of nostalgia associated with it—in fact, my memories are usually associated with post-party headaches (I used to blame the beechwood aging).
What has been a little surprising is the fact that after taking its initial shots, AB InBev has doubled down on its “let’s-chide-craft-beer-lovers” strategy, with new ads that celebrate Bud’s macro heritage.
With macro-brew sales slipping, this might seem like a pointless effort. But in reality, I don’t see what choice the mega-brewers have. As Chris Morris noted in a recent Fortune post, Bud is really preaching to the choir now—reinforcing the behaviors of long-time Bud drinkers who are slow to try anything new, and who generally see beer as a high-volume commodity, not something to be sipped and savored.
This might not increase sales, but it may help slow the erosion of its market.
After all, not everyone is an experienced or educated beer drinker. Some people simply like to drink LOTS of beer, and they cannot or will not pay craft beer prices. While there are lots of fine craft beer bars here in Akron, for example—I would also tell you that for every one of those, there are 8-10 other bars that slam out innumerable bottles of Bud and Miller Lite and Coors Light each and every night.
Sure, their customers may have briefly switched to Yuengling after it first became available in Ohio, but now the novelty has worn off and they are back to their old standby.
For these consumers (and boy, do they consume) it has always been about quantity over quality. To make the appeal clearer, you could plan out your weekly bar stops here in town and probably enjoy your “Dollar Domestics” night somewhere—at least five nights a week. That’s five or six 12 oz. bottles of beer for the price of a pint of something much better. That is, if you care about better.
The Bud ads are the equivalent of saying “Yeah—who’s the smart guy now? Six beers for the price of One? And ours will wash down that burger just as good.”
Most of us know the truth about quality. But this is the line of thinking that AB InBev is taking in speaking to its target audience. This is the same audience that ran the Sam Adams Rebel IPA off the tap at one of my local bars, after no one bought it and the barmaid characterized it as “undrinkable.” I know there was nothing wrong with it per se, only that it was a bitter, highly hopped IPA that was totally foreign to the palates of the “regular beer drinkers” who frequent that bar—and was quickly rejected.
It’s the same mind-set that takes umbrage at anyone trying to tell them what they are “supposed-to” like:
“Dammit, my dad drank Bud, and it was good enough for him. I’ve enjoyed it for years, and dammit, I’ll be dammed if any liberal, smart-alecky, thinks-he’s-better-than-me SOB is gonna tell me what I should drink or like. Same damn people that wanna take away my guns, tell me I gotta like gay people, or tell me where or when I can have a smoke. Hell with them. Give me another Bud.”
...then he goes out to his pickup with the Rebel Flag mudflaps and cranks up some Bro Country CD.
Okay – this characterization may be a little unfair. A similar attitude could be found with the college kid that never grew up; raised on dorm fridges filled with Bud, or PBR, or Busch—it may be all he ever feels the need to drink. The college degree did not include the finer points of beer brewing or consumption.
This is precisely why it may take years or decades before Big Beer cedes a really substantial portion of the market to craft beer. It took Prohibition, decades of TV advertising, force-of-habit, more advertising, and macro-beer economics to get to where we are today. The attitudes of most macro-beer consumers may never change, and AB InBev’s ad strategy seems to be designed to ensure that any change, if it does come, will come at the slowest rate possible.
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