Beer Buzz Words

This showed up in my InBox today and it reminded me of the thread "is IPA a marketing term".

Beer Buzz Words Brewbound Sessions

One thing kept coming to mind as I watched this - you really have to shut off the Beer Advocate microcosmic lens and remember this is research is more widely focused. For one thing, when they talk about ages and awareness of terms - I would almost bet that within our microverse that is either opposite or at least flat. The older people here are at least as aware, if not more aware, than the new folks of some of this terminology.

The very first slide which they kind of glossed over is pretty damned interesting in light of some recent threads and conversations here. Look at the No.1 on that slide...hmmmm...

The last slide is interesting. The first point captures something I think we take for granted here - everybody knows the terms. Seems that the "masses" in the general sense are less familiar with things we talk about every day. Point 4 ties in with that bringing up the opportunities for education. Point 5 essentially ties it all up with the KISS principle where less can be more - why put all those words on the label, in print, or media if a majority of consumers either don't know the terms in context or don't care.

Women vs. men differences - they note several times that women are more influenced when talk focuses on the flavors rather than the other parts of the lexicon.

I found the social media indexing topic pretty interesting. While I think social media "buzz" in general can be pretty ephemeral, it is interesting how the data is interpreted on the two slides shown. Quite surprising who is "over-indexing" given all the hoopla that has gone on lately.

The female presenter also points out the difficulty with the term "local" - that it means something but it is very difficult to truly define as people's interpretation of local varies so much.

There was a response that craft is associated with high-quality ingredients - they did not talk about it specifically but it was on a slide. Interesting - I don't recall seeing anything reflecting the quality of the actual beer, but the ingredients seem to carry some weight. Not sure I follow this - pretty sure the mass producers use quality ingredients as well.

At any rate, some food for thought and some interesting points made. All the caveats would apply - sample size, how the data was vetted, potential sources of bias, etc. but still worth a look overall.