What makes a beer premium?
Assessing what signposts one beer as better than another is a game of intricate marketing. Award-winning beer writer and author Pete Brown looks at the “post-craft” sector and suggests that consumers deserve better.
So another premium lager launches in the UK. But wait: this lager isn’t just premium. It’s not even super-premium. It’s… ultra-premium!
You could be forgiven for thinking that this is meaningless marketing nonsense. In the case of Modelo Especial, it is. But premiumisation has been an essential concept in marketing since at least the 1980s, and it’s here to stay. Which means as brands, we need to know how to do it better than it’s currently being done. And as consumers, we need to able to spot the nonsense for what it is.
Define ‘premium’
“Premium” is officially defined in UK beer market in terms of ABV. A premium ale is anything with a strength of 4.2% or above, whereas in lager it’s anything 4.5% or above. This is clearly nonsense, as it would make Tennents Super several degrees or premium higher than Pilsner Urquell, which would only be standard. So no one really uses it any more.
More widely, there are varying definitions, but none that are universally accepted. For example, premiumisation is defined by creative agency Pearlfisher Perspectives as “The bridge between the desirability of the luxury world and the function and necessity of the mass market.”
Back when I worked in marketing, I’d have accepted that as a pretty good definition. But these days, I have my own, which is “Persuading people to buy shit they don’t actually need.”
Since about the 1970s, for most people, we’ve been able to buy reasonably well-made stuff that doesn’t break, at an affordable price. My wife, for example, is still driving her late dad’s 2002 Vauxhall Astra – it still runs fine and passes its MOT every year, and unlike most new cars, you can easily park in just one bay in a multi-story car park. But if we all did that, the car industry would collapse. The same goes for fashion, furniture, you name it. If none of us bought stuff we didn’t need, the entire capitalist system would collapse.
So capitalism uses marketing to persuade us to buy stuff we don’t need. The main way it does that is by premiumisation. And that’s where the industry definition comes in. You might not need a new thing, but look at this one. It’s bigger. Shinier. Sexier. Forget needing it, you want it. You desire it.
Evolution of ‘premium’
The issue for alcoholic drinks is they are more attainable than a new car. In the 1990s, I worked on Stella Artois. Our ads were based on the idea that you’d sacrifice anything for a pint of it. This made it the most premium mainstream lager in Britain for many years (plus, it was a lot better-made back then.) But when you can acquire this desirable object down the pub, what was once premium becomes normalised. You start to take it for granted. It may even become known as “Wife Beater.”
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Absolut Vodka was another alcohol brand that was the most premium of its kind when it launched. Unlike Stella, Absolut has not started making a cheaper, inferior version of what it once was, and not changed its packaging. But where it was once the most premium vodka on the market, where it’s now served in the on-trade it’s a standard pour. It hasn’t changed. Our understanding of what is premium has moved on, driven by drinks companies looking to recreate – temporarily at least – that desire for something that’s more special than what we have now.
But if what we have already attained premium, the next thing has to be better. So marketers invented “super-premium”, only to be faced with the same problem years later. There’s only one thing. To do: create “ultra-premium!” And on it will go.
The annual reports of the big five global brewers talk constantly about premiumisation and show tiers of which brands go where. That’s because the report is aimed at investors, and in mature, developed beer markets, that are stagnant or declining in volume, investors need to see higher margins. You justify those margins either by creating better quality beers (interestingly, none of the big five are talking about craft any more, rarely acknowledging any of the brands they bought to halt the momentum of the craft sector) of you persuade people to pay more for the same old crap.
Asahi, for example, puts Pilsner Urquell – the original golden lager on which all others are based – in “tactical international brands”, its lowest tier. Peroni is in the top tier, “Global Super Premium Heroes,” despite the fact that taste, authenticity and brand quality – all of which Pilsner Urquell has in spades – factor into its definition of “super-premium.”
But my favourite is Molson Coors. Here, we have “Economy”, “Premium” and “Above Premium.” In their fevered corporate imagination, somehow Carling makes it into the premium category. In “Above Premium” – here we’re talking about God-tier beers that are so great, mere mortals are not able to drink them without exploding – we find… Madri, Cobra and Doom Bar.
‘Drinkers deserve better’
I would bet my US$200 bottle of 24% ABV Samuel Adams Utopias (vintage 1996) that even the people who drink Carling and Doom Bar would not recognise these hierarchies. Drinkers deserve better. Because they need real premium, or super-premium, drinks as much as the global brewing corporations do.
For years now, there has been a trend of “drinking less but better”. Craft beer answered that need so well, these guys spent tens of millions suffocating it. Post-pandemic, the less-but-better trend has accelerated. People are going out to the pub less, and drinking fewer drinks when they get there. But they are prepared to pay substantially more for each one of those drinks than they were. What do we give them in return? A light-struck Mexican lager in clear glass bottles brewed with cheap non-malt adjuncts, and a fake Spanish lager born and bre(we)d in Tadcaster and Burton-on-Trent.
Maybe that’s why younger drinkers today looking for a true “ultra-premium” experience are, in increasing numbers, bypassing beer altogether and heading straight for spirits and cocktails.
If beer wants them back, I’ve got another definition of premium that might be useful. If you adopt it, you won’t need any more of this “ultra-premium”, “mega-premium” or “planet-killing-look-down-on-our-work-ye-foolish-mortals-and-despair-premium”. It’s sufficient for as long as you stand by it and execute it properly. Consumers will always be happier to pay more for it than the rest of the stuff you churn out. It’s this: “Something that is better than it absolutely has to be.” I can point to examples of this in anything from boutique hotels to posh crisps. Outside what we must now call the “post-craft” sector, there are vanishing few examples of it in beer.
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What a refreshing and honest take on the crazy world of marketing. I can’t help thinking that fewer and fewer consumers will be hoodwinked by the type of rubbish marketers expect them to swallow at the prices they expect them to pay. Spanish lager brewed in Burton ??? You cannot be serious !