Washington Post: "Light beer heading toward 10-year low in sales"

Kind of funny, they note in this article that light beer dropped in 2003 from 51.4% to 50.3%. In biological statistics we call that "remarkably steady". Even the eight percent drop over 10 years is not that dramatic when you think about the huge percentage of the market they started with. Guess I would be more nervous if I was a BMC executive. A small percentage may well be millions of dollars.

 

They aren't very good at interpreting the numbers. Attributing the decline to craft beer is is problem.

The growth of consumption of wine and spirits is impacting the light beer and the overall beer market in general more than is the growth of craft beer. If the overall beer market were stable or growing the percentage increase of market share would be somewhat smaller. The craft market segment is relatively small part of the overall beer market and while it is growing, that growth is within a declining overall consumption of beer as the beverage of choice. However, the real threat to the general beer market has to do with the growth of wine and spirits consumption among the people with disposable income to spend on higher cost alcoholic beverages.

 

Tell us something we didn't know!


There's one man in particular we can thank for this....

 

people are trading their light beers for dasani bottled water. thanks dasani

 

Aside from color and carbonation, it's not as though there's a discernable difference.

"Gee, I can drink twice as many Dasani's as Bud Light's and I don't wake up with a headache. I can even remember what I did!"

 

How about the decline of Miller Light. It seems Bud and Coors Light are way more popular or at least thats what I seem to be noticing.

 

And who is that? Bacchus, the Roman god of grapes and wine? As others have pointed out, the rise in popularity of wine and spirits has contributed far more to the decline of light beer sales than craft beer has.

 

When you use a multi million dollar marketing campaign to sell a shitty product, its only a matter of time before the very masses wise up.

 

I believe wine and spirits have hurt beer, but light beer? Are they drinking diet Beam instead?

 

It addresses this at the end of the article.

"However, light beer’s taste and low calories may also contributed to its decline in market share. Another low-calorie alcoholic drink, Beam Suntory’s Skinnygirl line of diet wines and vodka dived 26 percent in 2013. Could diet alcoholic drinks be losing appeal?

“People don’t drink alcohol for health and wellness reasons,” Spiros Malandrakis, a senior alcoholic drinks analyst with Euromonitor, told The Washington Post. “Sometimes with marketers, navel gazing can become so much of a problem that you forget about how people go out and drink.”"

 

Funny, of the three I would much rather drink miller lite

 

Yeah, so I was right, spirits arent (particularly) hurting light beer, light beer is hurting because people who care about health arent drinking.

I will say though, that at the same alcohol level, spirits and wine have less carbs than beer.

 

But they brought out the retro cans to boost sales! Have you ever noticed that with the core BMC brands they never do anything to the actual liquid in the containers/cans? They merely re-size, re-design, re-package the same crap. So inventive...

 

Conversely, people who previously drank light beer because they thought it was "healthier" could be saying "F it, I'm drinking anyway, might as well make it a non-light beer and get some flavor."

 

This actually wouldn't surprise me. I mean there had to be a percentage of people out there who chose light beer because it had lower calories than a standard beer. If those people just give up beer all together for health/dietary reasons that could contribute to the decline.

 

Obvious choice. It's more full-bodied and flavorful.

 

Doesn't seem to be working for Corona. Their sales are way up.