Beer marketers are weird.
For starters, they don’t see beer as a drink.
They think it’s mood swill.
No wonder it’s hard to find a great-tasting beer in Canada or the U.S.
Beer makers are obsessed with immature young men.
They don’t make beer for women, for lunch, to enjoy with steak frites or bacon and aged cheddar on a bagel or as you read Harry Potter, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Life of Pi, Sensible Cruising Designs or Henry Mintzberg’s Managers not MBAs.
No beer exists in North America to complement these pastimes and tastes.
North American beer is pale transport to a buzz, brewed to reduce taste to a minimum as taste disappears after two applications anyway.
Is it any wonder overall beer sales are as stagnant as the beer itself? With billions of dollars spent on beer advertising annually, overall sales are flat as piss on a plate. It has been this way for decades.
Silly asses fighting each other for share and letting the whole side down.
A legendary drink, containing elements rich and sympathetic to the human
condition, wholesome and nourishing, sold out, a victim of brand myopia, golden liquid trapped in mediocrity, like pills in a bottle.
All beer commercials are the same, even when they look different.
Incredibly, few beer marketers have noticed that beer is a drink.
You don’t have to believe me that this is so, but you do have to think.
How can something as wonderful as beer not grow in market size with billions of dollars pushing it yearly? Instead, red wine is catching up, some of it plonk.
I wonder why?
In the ’60s someone would have noticed.
Graham Watt is a former Canadian juror at the Cannes Ad Festival, and a co-winner of the Fritz Speiss Award for lifetime contribution to Canadian television advertising. He shut down his Montreal agency, Watt Burt Advertising, in 2000 and now lives in the Maritimes, running his current company, Invisible Inc. He is also working on a book.
