Julia is a 23 year-old graduate student. Like many her age, she’s working hard to meet her goals in a pretty competitive environment. She has big plans, and big expectations, for her future. She’s not really the “work hard, play hard” type, but she does enjoy de-stressing on the weekends by hanging out with her friends and having a beer or two. When one of them has a party, they usually get a keg of inexpensive beer, but more often than not there are some craft beers in the fridge, too. Julia always visits the fridge before the keg, just to see what might be in there. “I find myself gravitating toward the other people who drink craft beer, too,” she says. “It just seems like they would be more interesting people.”
The Next Generation of Craft Beer Drinkers: Marketing to Adult Millennials
The New Brewer
Beer drinkers, and the brands that court them, have always struck me as a group with a particular appreciation for a good laugh. Music is also a big part of a beer lover’s world. So it’s no surprise that a lot of brewers have used humor and music in their marketing, often in a big way.
On the one extreme there’s Bud Light, a brand that’s built more than a decade’s worth of advertising equity on humor that’s sometimes brilliant, but always willfully sophomoric. Still, you don’t have to look much further than the way some brewers name their brands to get the sense that craft brewers’ sense of humor is a little different – often absurd and more than a little ironic. What mainstream brewer would have had the audacity to give a beer a name like Moose Drool or Hairy Eyeball, or to make an assertion like Arrogant Bastard’s “It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth?”
On the one extreme there’s Bud Light, a brand that’s built more than a decade’s worth of advertising equity on humor that’s sometimes brilliant, but always willfully sophomoric. Still, you don’t have to look much further than the way some brewers name their brands to get the sense that craft brewers’ sense of humor is a little different – often absurd and more than a little ironic. What mainstream brewer would have had the audacity to give a beer a name like Moose Drool or Hairy Eyeball, or to make an assertion like Arrogant Bastard’s “It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth?”
Using Music and Humor to Make People Thirsty
The New Brewer
In the summer of 2011 Milwaukee was one of several cities visited by a small but impossible-to-miss traveling carnival. The city’s Humboldt Park was temporary home to a collection of oddities that gave new meaning to the word “eclectic”: fire eaters, unclassifiable music acts, mechanical wonders, tents featuring food and beer, and every imaginable means of celebrating the bicycle (not to mention many never before imagined).
This was the annual visit by New Belgium’s Tour de Fat (which returned this past summer, this time at Milwaukee’s lakefront). The signature event of the day was the bicycle parade, in which the costumed festival-goers rode their own bikes through the streets wearing “some sort of mix of English tweed, steampunk, or just plain wacko,” as described by Colin, a 26-year-old regular Tour de Fat attendee.
This was the annual visit by New Belgium’s Tour de Fat (which returned this past summer, this time at Milwaukee’s lakefront). The signature event of the day was the bicycle parade, in which the costumed festival-goers rode their own bikes through the streets wearing “some sort of mix of English tweed, steampunk, or just plain wacko,” as described by Colin, a 26-year-old regular Tour de Fat attendee.
Craft Brands at Play
The New Brewer
