U.S. Beers Fight it Out! Bud Falling, Craft Beer Climbing

According to a recent article in Brandchannel, Budweiser is about to be overtaken as the #2 beer in the U.S. by Coors Light.  Bud Light still leads all beers with a whopping 19.1% share of the U.S. beer market, followed by Budweiser at 8.7% and Coors Light at 8.5%. 

To continue building momentum, MillerCoors is increasing marketing spending in 2011 by $50 million.  Imagine that...a product that is gaining market share by increasing its marketing spending.  Funny how that works!  But I digress.

While the major breweries are duking it out at the top of the mountain, it seems the real action is in the micro-brew or "craft beer" scene.   According to the Brewers Association, which recently reported that while overall beer sales were off by 1% in 2010, "beer sales [for craft breweries] jumped from $7 billion in 2009 to $7.6 billion in 2010. The number of barrels sold by craft brewers rose from 8.9 million in 2009 to nearly 10 million in 2010."

Portfolio.com, cites several reasons for the increase in craft beer sales:  "For people who can no longer afford a luxury vacation, the ability to treat themselves to a tasty local beer for just a few dollars more is a reward they still can afford, said Todd Usry, Breckenridge Brewery director."  Additionally, "At a time when large corporations are laying people off and becoming less relatable to average Americans, craft breweries are still seen as a local product and member of the community, said Eric Wallace, president of Left Hand Brewing Co. of Longmont."

It has become very chic and trendy to drink craft beer.  Sitting on a stool in a bar asking for a Bud Light, when a slew of micro brews are on the menu, is often viewed as conservative and perenially "unhip".  Craft beer is to the brewery world, what Mac is to the home computer world. 

Is this a sustainable trend?  Who knows? But if the big boys don't figure out how to put themselves back on the socially "in" column, you can bet that major brands will continue to see a drop in sales. 

Though overall, craft beer sales still only make up about 4.3% of U.S. beer sales by volume.

I'll leave you with some fun beer drinking factoids pulled from a recent Advertising Age study:

• Craft beer drinkers spend more time thinking about beer than work
 • Fans of Budweiser are 42 percent more likely to drive a truck than the average person
 • Bud Light drinkers are 34 percent more likely to shun organic products
 • Michelob Ultra drinkers are conceited, while those who drink Heineken are posers
 • Blue Moon consumers are 77 percent more likely to own Macs and a whopping 105 percent more likely than the average person to drive a hybrid
 • Corona drinkers are 38 percent more likely to own three or more flat screen TVs

Now, I'm in the mood for a cold one.  Give me a Michelob Ultra...(heh), I mean a Dirty Dan's Mean Ale, please!

BP & The Pres Need PR Help

OK, I’ve been trying to avoid blogging about the BP oil disaster, as it seems to be a popular topic for every other blogger in America regardless of which side of the political isle you sit on.

However, the PR gaffes from both BP and the Obama administration have made it impossible to ignore any longer. Their continual ignorance makes me wonder if they either don’t have good PR advisors or if they are just not listening to the advisors they have.

BP’s PR agency of record is The Brunswick Group, which up until now, has had a stellar reputation. However, in a recent story in Advertising Age, here is what the magazine’s Michael Bush wrote:

“All of the industry executives and competitors of Brunswick that Ad Age spoke to, who all asked not to be identified, praised the shop for its work in the mergers-and-acquisitions, financial-communications, litigation, CEO-positioning and corporate-communications sectors. But a number of them questioned the decision to have the agency's Washington office lead the crisis based on its size. “

It appears that The Brunswick Group may be in over its head and/or is simply not identifying all possible scenarios.

In my opinion, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that a company chairman should never refer to the people his company hurt as “small people”; that a company president should never say, “I want my life back”, when his company has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people; or for that same president to take a vacation and watch his personal yacht race, while gulf fishermen watch their livelihoods disappear, as their boats sit in dry dock.

I’m not sure what The Brunswick Group is doing, but it clearly isn’t enough. Although in fairness, it is difficult defending the indefensible.

As for President Obama… well, his PR braintrust isn’t faring much better. Why would you wait a month to visit an area that has been devastated by a disaster, then claim that you are in charge of the clean up effort, when that effort is a joke? Then the President decided to attend baseball games, play golf, entertain friends and athletes at the White House, and otherwise enjoy all the benefits that being the President has to offer, while his constituents along the gulf coast continued to watch their lives fall apart. You would have thought he’d have learned something after the Bush handling of Katrina, especially since he was one of Bush’s harshest critics. But it appears that he learned nothing.

Exactly what did having the BP leadership team sitting in front of a congressional hearing accomplish other than giving members of congress a platform to grandstand? Did they really think that Americans didn’t already know that BP was responsible for the oil leak? Did they really think that the questions that they asked BP execs haven’t already been asked of Tony Hayward and his minions dozens of times already? It was a pathetic attempt to look like leaders, by people who are anything but! However, it's what congress does best.

To continually claim that BP doesn’t care about the disaster, in my opinion, is just naïve and ignorant. If someone, anyone, can give me one good reason why BP wouldn’t want this disaster cleaned up as quickly as possible, I’m listening! BP has absolutely NOTHING to gain by this situation lingering on.

Has BP made mistakes? Many! Has President Obama made mistakes? You bet!! Do they both want this disaster to end as quickly as possible? Absolutely! Are they both just as incompetent in their efforts to do so? No question about it.

Please stop pointing fingers. Just fix the problem and make sure that taxpayers don’t wind up footing the bill.