Beer 0.0

It was a Monday morning. The prospect of another work week stretched out before me. The weekend had left me drained, what with a tummy upset and a 22 hour power outage starting Saturday 10 pm. As I browsed through the pages of the leading pink (actually, make that yellow) paper, the following headline roused me from my reverie.

‘Heineken targets global leadership with new zero alcohol beer’

‘Zero alcohol’ sounded like a step up from assorted (and mostly unavailable) music CD’s, bottled water, playing cards, beer mugs, whisky cut-glasses and sundry useless products alcobev companies routinely peddle in order to get around the advertising laws of the country. But this article was datelined from Brussels, where they have more ethical adherence to sensible laws. I then thought it must be a 6 week late April Fools article (shouldn’t pink papers recycle?). But as I read on, it was apparent that this article meant business. 

‘Heineken is hoping to tap into what it believes is an increasing desire among consumers for beer that will not get them drunk’

I had to read that line a couple of times over. ‘Must be the effects of the antibiotics I’m on’, I mumbled to myself. As I mused over this insight (a capability the company is no doubt very proud of), a few things troubled me. Firstly, they have identified a segment of consumers who drink beer / alcohol but don’t want to get drunk. Secondly, they are ‘hoping’ to tap into this segment with aforesaid 0.0 variant. 

Now why do people drink alcohol? Great marketers start off any segmentation exercise by generating a set of hypothesis, then go find the data to support it by subjecting consumers to an interrogative set of questions and then work out an elegant framework to explain all of it in as simple a term as possible.

The SIS need-state framework

So here is my elegant framework: while the reasons why consumers drink alcoholic beverages may be many, but they cluster down to a 3 letter acronym - SIS; to get pleasantly Sloshed, to get highly Intoxicated, to get Smashed. Often in that order of progression. SIS is all there is to alco-bev marketing.  

But who were these people who wanted to drink alcohol / beer but didn’t want to conform to SIS? Why on earth are they ‘thirsting’ for the taste of a beverage that is (at best) bitter & acidic and (at worst) quite sweet & syrupy? If you wanted only the former sans any alchol, there was always a fresh-lime soda you could order; if the latter then there are carbonated drinks and a robust ‘coloured bovine’ drink you could quaff. 

Apparently there are quite a few, because: 

‘You could expect 10 to 15 years down the road this would be more or less the global trend. We want to make Heineken the leading global beer brand in 0.0," senior Heineken brand director Gianluca Di Tondo told Reuters.’

My guess is that the above mentioned Senior Brand Director would possibly have guzzled down a few pints of 5.0 and lurched to the right side of the SIS framework as he spoke to Reuters, and hence his prediction.

‘Beer critics say a key reason why zero alcohol beer has failed on previous occasions is taste’

Hmmm, ‘beer critics’. Now you would be critical of something if you didn't like it for some reason. In that case, taste would be an obvious reason why you wouldn’t consume a beverage. After all, the only bad tasting beverage one willingly drinks are liquid medicines. 

The article also briefly touches on ‘calories’, but that is a dead end known to us seasoned marketers. Some of you may turn around and point out the growing sugar-free trend seen in soft-drinks and candy. But in these categories, you can pretty much match and retain the taste of a carbonated drink and yet dump out all the bad stuff (sugar). Ditto for candy & gum. Chocolate is a lot tougher, because the sugar substitutes & fillers used when consumed in large quantities tend to have laxative effects and no one consumes just a little bit of chocolate! 

Anyway, the universal insight is that anyone drinking beer isn’t counting calories, certainly not after the first pint.

No, I think the key reason for failure is far more nuanced. It has to do with, well, the absence of alcohol.

The 'Hope' strategy

There is a second thing that that troubled me reading the article: a strategy based on ‘hope’. It was Rudy Giuliani who famously said to Barrack Obama - ‘Hope is not a strategy’. I guess Heineken found solace in the fact that Obama won. But still. 

So here is my prediction for the future - in the world of beer, you are either in or you are out. You can’t be in & out; which is what Beer 0.0 is ‘hoping’ to be.

Here is the link to the article : https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/business/heineken-targets-global-leadership-with-new-zero-alcohol-beer/articleshow/58661408.cms

And here is my disclaimer: the above is a satirical piece. I love beer, I love Heineken, I will personally do my bit to get them to global leadership (as long as its not 0.0!)