10 Jan 2013 Carlsberg taps the next big beer market (really): women
Jorgen Buhl Rasmussen, the CEO of brewing giant Carlsberg Group, says the big beer industry has grown stale when it comes to innovation, and altogether too comfortable with its staple consumer: sports-loving dudes.
“The beer category has been suffering in terms of image. In the last 10 to 15 years, it is often connected with drunken people on the street sitting with beer cans,” he says. While the craft beer trend has been injecting new life into the beer market, it is also still too male-oriented. Men still buy 74% of lager beers, according to Datamonitor. For Carlsberg, men buy 80%.
“We can and we must come up with more products that are appealing to females,” Rasmussen says.
That task is first product development, followed by smart marketing, he believes. And neither of those are easy, as women have traditionally been more interested in wine than beer-style brewed drinks. So Carlsberg is dipping its toe in the market, inventing a few new female-friendly products and marketing them carefully and organically in small, highly developed markets like Sweden and Switzerland.
The alternative drink laboratory is sticky-sweet and littered with failure. Beer companies have tried beer in slim-line cans, light beers, and beers so fruity they might as well be wine coolers. Brewers have tried low-carb, low-calorie, and caffeine-fused drinks.
Some “malternative” and “alcopop” brands like Coors’s Zima were hot for a time, but ultimately discontinued. Some wine coolers switched from wine-based drinks to malt-based mixtures and took a precipitous slide in sales in the 2000s. The Alizé cognac-based liquors became an urban product rather than high-end.
But beer industry veterans haven’t given up hope completely. Rasmussen and others still think product innovation and marketing brewed drinks toward women is possible. Increasingly, women know about different, palate-friendly beers like Abbey Ales, fruit lambics, ciders, ginger beers, and dark stouts – as well as about the more varied glassware they require and how to pair them with foods.
Women want “a less bitter, non-bloating beer that does not give you a malty/hoppy aftertaste and breath,” says Carlsberg spokesman Ben Morton. “Flavour proliferation has become a key feature of beer innovation.”
Furthermore, it’s a key way forward when sales and profits in mature markets like the US and Western Europe have plateaued and Carlsberg and the other top four beer companies in the world are facing competition on all sides from rival beverages ranging from Red Bull to wine to whisky.
“If you look back at the last 10-20 years, and you think about what has been done in terms of innovation in the beer category, yes, you have some but not enough,” he says. “We are focused on doing more innovation to make this category more attractive and to get more consumers to engage.”
Rasmussen thinks a future round of innovation should start with product innovation rather than marketing the same old stuff in a different way. As CEO, he centralised innovation at Carlsberg, combining the R&D centre with consumer insights and innovation marketing teams. The company doesn’t disclose R&D figures. But he has made “female drinks” a platform inside the company, identifying it as a major initiative on par with “health and wellness” innovation. He’s recruited female executives, researchers, and marketers to lead the brainstorming for these new “brewed” drink categories.
The idea, he says, is not to create wine coolers or non-beer products geared to women. Rather, he wants to come up with new types of drink recipes that can be made in Carlsberg-owned breweries but are lighter in alcohol, refreshing in taste, and perceived as healthy enough to take on wine, champagne, and other drinks vying for women’s dollars…..