Pump clips from the GBBF. So. Not. Sexy.
Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder…from today’s Mirror, researchers prove beer goggles exist. Which begs the questions– why did they need experts to prove this, and why, exactly, is this news?
The researchers administered vodka to test subjects– probably mixed with something to mask the alcohol. So, technically, they really haven’t proved the validity of beer goggles, at least in my mind.
Beer isn’t really sexy-making, is it? Beer in the quantity that gives one goggles also bloats and queases. Beer marketers have a lot of work to do if they really want to bring sexy back in a more universal aspect– this would mean more than a stemmed glass (apparently the stemmed 1/3 pint glass at the GBBF was designed to appeal to women. Does anyone else find this strange?)
Yesterday I was at the Market Porter, drinking a wonderfully estery Crouch Vale Eldorado when I spied a pump clip for a beer called “Forbidden Fruit” featuring a be-thonged prepubescent-looking buttocks with a disembodied hand holding a strawberry over the tail bone. The tag line read, You know you want it. Er…ok. But can you put it in a stemmed glass? Part of me thought, gee– that beer must be pretty great to survive such a horrible pump clip, but I’m not getting anywhere near it. Many beers are marketed as “sexy”, with a shameless use of women’s bodies. (In the US these babed-out ad campaigns are reserved for the “Bud Girls” and other megabreweries.) It’s just uncool, really, and no amount of beer goggles could make this bad taste good. Every time I see something like this it’s the equivalent of a cold shower. Is it any wonder women drink wine? Have you ever seen a crappily drawn bikini clad woman on a wine bottle? Real ale in the UK would be forward looking if that approach were just ditched, lumped, exstinctified. In my more paranoid moments I figure these ad campaigns in the UK are designed to deter women and save all the good stuff for men.
Witness the wrong-on-all-levels Shepherd Neame ad:
...a bowl of water for me bitches
So, while beer advertising evolves (one lives in hope), let’s talk about beer. What is the sexiest beer you’ve even had? What made it so? Mine without a doubt would be Paradox Grain. Teh hotness.
Impy Malting 
I wrote about Hart’s Brewery’s pumpclips back in January: How not to market you beer – a case study.
Among the 57 comments, you’ll see there were actually a few people who thought they were good. A few wrongly believed I was being in some way puritanical – I wasn’t. I just thought it was very sad and would make people who weren’t geeks shun the product. But hey-ho.
Well said, as always.
Ugh. Yes, those labels illustrating your post are horrible. Those are really just slightly cack-handed copies of the covers of porn mags with elf ears and and chain mail added to all the models. Which are exactly the things I associate with a nice pint of beer.
Exactly… And they wonder why beer isn’t drank by women. The whole image is pretty off putting. A few wine like beer glasses won’t change things when beer labels like this are about. Mainstream beer advertising doesn’t help, every ad is about men getting drunk with their friends. With beer sales falling you’d think they’d give a look at that other 50% of the market they ignore. And not just assume women like overly sweet crap fruit beers.
Hi Laura,
It’s really odd to me that beer marketing departments are not looking to tap into this vast market of potential women drinkers– and worse, actively working to put them off.
I think it’s truly bizarre that there is a “type” of beer women seem to like– I’ve had guys recommend beers to me because “ladies like them.” and I still have no idea what that means. Chances are, like you say, they are some fruity crap thing, or something overly sweet.
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