Coors joins brewers trying to tap women’s market for beer

by Barbara Murray, August 22nd, 2008, 7:00 am

Wanna be one of the guys? Belly up to the bar? Patronize your local pub? Coors is courting the ladies. Yep, despite women’s sadly inadequate belching talents and less rabid devotion to football (American-style, or soccer, if you live on the other side of the Atlantic) as their gender counterparts, Coors, among others, is aiming at the ladies.

Coors is not the first brewer to hit upon this supposedly obvious idea to ramp up sales — after all, women are half the population. Interbrew (the Belgian brewery that merged with Brazil’s AmBev in 2004 to become InBev) tried a cherry-flavored concoction called Kreik. Launched in 2004, it was a disaster. Then there are all the craft brewers, whose seasonal beers are often made using the literal fruits of the harvest, who encourage the ladies to tip a few. UK-based Diageo is pushing its Guinness Red by advertising it as (listen up, women) tasting sweeter and smelling less strong than its traditional Guinness.

Trouble is, brewers never quite know how to market the stuff. Do they go with the line that women want to join men in their appreciation of the foam-laden amber liquid (but then, why make separate products?); or do they, as they are trying this time around, offer a “special brew just for you,” which runs the risk of making the companies look like they’re patronizing women? After all, today’s women are the daughters and granddaughters of Rosie, the Riveter, in the workforce in ever greater numbers; they make up more than half the enrollment in medical and law schools; they buy their own automobiles and houses; they even play professional football. Who says women need frilly (dare I say it?) paper-parasol-embellished beers?

Let us digress a moment to speak to women and beer. A few telling facts: 4,000 years ago, the master brewers in Mesopotamia were women. They had a beer goddess. In ancient Babylon, the brewers were designated as priestesses. Zip up a little closer in time to today and we see that until the end of the 1700s, nearly every cottage in the English countryside brewed its own beer. The brewers? The women of the cottages (thus, the term “ale wives”). Eventually, the best of these cottage/home brewery operations became “public houses” or pubs. When traveling through her realm, Queen Elizabeth I sent couriers ahead to taste the local ale. If it wasn’t up to Lizzie’s standards, a shipment of a more pleasing-to-the royal-pallet libation was sent out to her from London.

But let us step out of the Wayback Machine and return to 2008. Beer sales in the UK are sagging (they fell 4.5 % in the second quarter). In the US, they have increased some of late (up 1.9% in the first half as compared to the first half of last year). But 1.9% isn’t enough to make brewers dance atop their oasts.

Coors has just this year created an operation (code-named Eve) devoted exclusively to the development of beer brands and marketing techniques that appeal to women. Not quite ready with an actual product yet, Coors has begun encouraging pub owners to push its new-to-the-UK-market Blue Moon product “with touches like serving it with an orange slice to accentuate its fruity taste.” Some pubs are coating the orange slices with brown sugar. (It’s enough to rouse the envy of Martha Stewart, these chi-chi touches.)

Back in the good old USA, MillerCoors (a joint venture between UK-based SABMiller and Molson Coors), has come up with MGD 64, the lowest calorie beer ever made for the US market, at 64 calories per 12-ounce serving. (By comparison its standard Miller Genuine Draft has 143 calories per 12-ounce serving.) And we all know, don’t we ladies, that beer is more fattening. (Remember low-carb beer?)

To further its push to females, MGD 64 is being promoted in Seattle and Portland via a clothes-hanger campaign. Dry cleaners in those cities will distribute hangers with an attached message that touts the beer’s 64 calories as “a perfect fit” in order to “exclusively reach adult female consumers in the privacy of their homes.” Why Seattle and Portland women are the lucky recipients of these ad-festooned hangers is not clear. Suffice it to say, it (and the whole clothes-hanger idea) was some enthusiastic marketing decision.

If the coat hangers — I’m not even going near the Mommie Dearest associations — and Coors’ Eve unit (described as “designed to create a world where women love beer as much as they love shoes”) are examples of modern, enlightened, and revenue-enhancing thought, then the boys in the executive suites have no clue beer-wise, regarding a salable answer to Freud’s question, “What do women want?”

Freud, by the way, had no decent answers either.