You don’t have to be a geezer to remember the halcyon days of beer marketing, but it helps. Back then, beer advertising presented young men with an idyllic route to manhood. Guys soaked up these thirty and sixty-second dramas and their beer-brand messages wrapped in decidedly masculine appeals. Camaraderie, appreciation for hard work, the simple reward of downtime, the joy of blowing off steam with frat-boy irreverence, and of course, how to get the girl. Cut to the bottles being opened.

And then it was all gone.  

Top executives at the big brewers in those days used to be ornery folks even when business was good. Had someone told August 
Busch III that managing a Budweiser decline would be an acceptable business strategy, that someone would’ve been fortunate to…. Never mind, no one would’ve dared utter such craziness in earshot of Mr. Busch.  

So with today’s volume losses on every major Big Beer brand, you might think marketing heads at the breweries must be rolling like so many empty kegs. Think again. If you listen carefully, you can almost sense a collective shrug from Big Beer. Comments to the press like “It’s not unexpected” and “We’re managing the decline better than our competition” absolve marketing people of blame. There was a time when careers would have ended marked by those last words. Big Beer has not only gone flat, it seems to have gone soft, too.  

And not just in the corporate corridors.

When you take a close look at contemporary beer advertising you notice the softness, a diminished sense of masculinity that was never there before. Males in beer ads these days are routinely portrayed as clueless or socially awkward. Women often play controlling, even dominating roles. How many times have we seen gorgeous female bartenders emasculate some beer-drinking doof with a snarky put-down, or just a withering look?  When Viagra ads are more in sync with what young men want, something’s out of kilter in the beer world.

The masculinity themes that appeal to young men coming of age should be well-known to the breweries. Social success. Acceptance. Respect. Young men don’t want to be seen as clowns, unless they can achieve the revered status of class-clown. Where are these once-celebrated appeals in today's beer-advertising strategies?  What major beer brand directly connects with them? 

Bueller? Anyone?

I can almost hear the whine: “But masculinity has changed, you old coot!” Ignoring the insult (which I would not do in person), my gut tells me this purported "new masculinity" is a faux insight. But even if we concede a new definition, it would only mean beer marketers should've by now developed a deep understanding of its precise character (and not just what someone hoped it might be). With all of that, if your insightful new definition of masculinity isn't helping sell more beer, chances are it’s bogus.

Craft-beer makers spend pennies where the big guys spend millions.  But these hotshots of today’s beer business possess a powerful natural instinct for the masculinity that’s gone missing from corporate beerdom. How else to explain their choice of brand names like Alpha King, Fat Woody, Mojo Risin’ and Rogue?

And their business is neither flat nor soft.

Before I get to beer, some personal history.  Bear with me.

I drive an Audi.  So what, you say, there are tons of them around. You're right, of course, but that wasn't always the case. And I know because this is the eighth Audi I've owned since the mid-80s.  When I got my first one, Audi was an outsider brand.  And while nobody ever asked me directly, "Why'd you buy THAT?" I just knew in my head that's exactly what people were thinking. Fortunately, also stuck in my head--and on a little badge on the back of the car-- was an answer: "quattro."  Now, I was pretty much clueless about all the engineering intricacies of this feature, but I did know it meant I had two more wheels working than pretty much everyone else at the time. So if anybody ever did question my brand choice, I had the satisfaction of a ready and irrefutable retort.  "Quattro."  Boom.

Of course, the question in the headline up above is one very few guys have ever heard uttered from a nearby barstool as their beer was served up.  Heck, it'd be close to a bar-fight taunt.  But it's a question that whispers somewhere in the psyche whenever they order a beer, especially so in social situations. "Why are you drinking THAT?" Even if no one ever actually hears the question spoken, guys seem to need the confidence of an answer.  The beer equivalent of "quattro."

I think this need for some sort of brand-selection security blanket born of a product-related fact has a special masculine dynamic. Not being a psychologist, I won't speculate on the deeper emotional needs of my brothers in this regard, but I'm pretty sure there's something to it.  Guys need that return-fire "boom."  

Over the years, beer brands have provided plenty of ammunition, featuring ready responses.  They've spent heavily to emphasize a brand's processes ("real draft brewing"), their source ("imported from Canada"), what was in the beer ("Rocky Mountain Spring Water"), and what wasn't ("a third fewer calories"). These and other facts weren't relegated to small type on their labels, either. They were important brand equities dramatized in expensive television commercials year after year (apparently, repetition really helps guys pick stuff up).  And they helped drive some mega-successes.

In strategic terms, these bits of factual information allowed drinkers to believe their brand was special. As has been mentioned here more than once, this is advertising's #1 job.  It's no coincidence that nowadays every single craft beer is doing precisely the same thing: trumpeting its brewing process, or where it's brewed, or what's in the beer, or what isn't. Sometimes all of this. That's how committed the crafties are to accomplishing advertising's #1 job--and to becoming successful--even if their budgets are on the micro side.

Oddly, at least two big brands with decidedly macro budgets eschew strategic reference to any fact-based product distinction.  See if you can find any mention of process, where the beer comes from, what's in the beer, or what's not in the beer--or any other fact at all about the beer--in either of these current commercials...

I can't, either.

So, tell me again.  Why am I....