Marketing beer is fun.
When you have a product that so many people enjoy and you are told to “Go sell this!” you can have a pretty amusing and creative time.
Many of the world’s larger breweries have found a useful formula when advertising their wares: Beer = Boobs + Friends + Sports Heroes.
It is that simple.
Perhaps this form of advertising has a tendency to set the human race back a few years but c’mon, it’s fun and it works. It works very well.
Beer, however, is a big industry that has a bunch of distinct markets within it. Thus, export-minded breweries, craft breweries and brew pubs carve out their own niche using different angles through which to market themselves.
Take us at the Yukon Brewing Company for example. It is no secret that the Yukon Territory has its own mystique in the eyes of the people who live here and love it as well as to the thousands of people who visit the territory each year in search of something magical, untouched and pure.
To play on this with our brands and our advertising for those brands is natural. Also, we never feel bad doing it because we all view ourselves as true Yukoners making beer for other like-minded people with similar tastes and sentiments about the place we live in.
Sometimes, however, marketing skirts the line between fun or silly and absolutely ridiculous. Word has it that Sapporo Holdings, an international brewing giant out of Japan, is producing the world’s first, wait for it … “Space Beer!”
Apparently, Sapporo got their hands on some barley that was once stored on the International space station for a period of five months and will now create a beer out of it instead of just throwing it away. Great that the barley will not be going to waste, but how does space change the product’s genetics?
Turns out, it does not change a thing. The idea behind having barley in space was that it can grow in a relatively wide variety of climates and temperatures and is high in nutrients and fibre.
Thus, barley is an ideal plant to test for space agriculture. However, scientists concede that no difference has been found in barley that has spent time in space and barley that has stayed true to Earth’s atmosphere.
Still, Sapporo will create about 100 bottles of Space Brew to start and has no plans on developing the beer as a commercial venture. In other words, Sapporo is just having some fun creating a product that will ensure the brewery’s name sticks in the collective consciousness of consumers.
There is plenty of advertising out there that you don’t need to turn on your B.S. filters for and plenty more that probably deserves to be filtered but you don’t because it is all in good fun … just as long as you don’t get hosed by ridiculous messaging.
Then again, if you do, hopefully you can laugh it off, for now. You never know when we’ll all need to move to space and Sapporo will be refreshing us all with delicious Space Beer.
This column is courtesy of the Yukon Brewing Company, an organization that is proud to say its product is not out of this world.
