AB-InBev to woo women

With all the hype around Millennials and GenerationYs, brewers can be forgiven for having left a consumer cohort underserved: women. After all, who knows what women want? While handbag and shoe makers always seem to know the answer, brewers in the past mostly failed to get their offerings right: Or does anyone remember Animee (Molson Coors), let alone Eve (Carlsberg)?

Now it’s AB-InBev’s turn. Of course, shrewd as they are, they would not say it out loud. No crass pulling for them. Unlike their predecessors they have given their marketing drive a wholly innocuous term: they call this summer of love “2015 - the year of innovation”.

Female consumers in Belgium, the Netherlands and France are presented with a full drinks tray on which they will find ciders (Stella Artois Cidre), radlers (Hoegaarden), and a rum-flavoured beer (Cubanisto), which bears an uncanny resemblance to Heineken’s tequila-flavoured beer Desperados.

In fact, none of these drinks are new under the sun. But perhaps this is the whole point. It will be interesting to see if these colour and flavour variations are really the way to a woman’s heart.