Alcohol — one of the few recession-proof retail verticals left. When times are good, people will drink to celebrate. When times are bad, they’ll drink to forget. Whatever the reason, people have reached for bottles since ancient times, but the big beer companies of the last several decades — Budweiser, Coors and other mass market beer manufacturers — have found that their products and advertising are falling on deaf ears when it comes to one all-important demographic: millennials.
Bloomberg explained just how tough of a spot big beer companies have found themselves in. On top of losing 10 percent of the market to wine and hard liquor since 2006, six out of every 10 millennials believe that a brewer’s independence matters when choosing craft beers — their new favorite beverage type at the expense of traditional beers and sugary ready-to-drink cocktail products. Moreover, according to Paste, 75 percent of not just millennials but all drinkers now live within 10 miles of a craft brewery, making locally produced drinks available in any nearby bar that would have them.
“I know that [big beer is] panicking about that loss of market share,” John Verive, founder of the blog Beer of Tomorrow, told Bloomberg. “So, they’re going after whatever fragment of a market they can. They’re just going in every different direction.”
One of those “different directions” is of the acquisitive variety. Bloomberg explained that AB InBev, Budweiser’s parent company, began buying up craft breweries in 2011 with the purchase of Chicago’s Goose Island Beer Co. Since then, AB InBev has acquired four more U.S. breweries from 2012 to 2014 and two more in Dec. 2015 alone. Coors, too, has been busy making inroads with the millennial craft beer movement, purchasing San Diego’s Saint Archer Brewing Co. in 2014.
However, in adopting an “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality in the battle against craft beers for millennials’ tastebuds, big beer companies are creating yet another obstacle in the path to connecting with millennials. Jorn Socquet, vice president of marketing at Anheuser-Busch, admitted to Bloomberg that figuring out how to market newly acquired craft-brewed products poses a peculiar dilemma for AB InBev — either they risk “tainting” the product with the scent of big business that millennials hate, or they forgo traditional marketing routes and sacrifice guaranteed increases in visibility for the sake of the soul of a product line.
As Jackie Dodd, founder of beer culture site The Beeroness, told Bloomberg, the very thought of a craft brewery owned by a faceless corporation like AB InBev is enough to turn even the most ardently brand-loyal millennial off.
“When you think about craft, you think about the people making these beers, and then when you think of AB InBev, you think of a big, stainless steel, cold, humanless factory,” Dodd said. “That might be one of the things people are worried about — don’t take the soul out of my beer.”
If mass market beer companies can’t help sucking the souls out of millennials’ favorite beers, maybe they’ll have better luck infusing their own products with a sense of chic belonging. Forbes reported that Carlsberg Group, the fourth-largest brewery conglomerate in the world, announced at the 2015 World Economic Forum that it was hard at work researching a new product couched in the language of environmentalism that officials are sure will capture millennials’ attention, no matter what kind of beer they’re drinking: biodegradable wooden bottles.
“Sustainability is about doing the right things, which are also right for the business,” Simon Hoffmeyer Boas, director of sustainability at Carlsberg, told Forbes. “Every step of that process is an opportunity to share content with our employees, suppliers and consumers.”
Carlsberg’s wooden beer bottles won’t be market-ready until 2018 at the earliest, though, putting Budweiser, Coors and the rest of big beer on the hot seat of marketing to millennials on the lifelong hunt for the perfectly chilled craft beer.
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