AB-InBev knows what women don’t want

USA | The old enigma “women and beer” has been solved. Guess what, Marketing Men had got it wrong all along. Molly Hayes, AB-InBev’s global director of innovation/insights, discussed a year-long research effort to understand how the female audience views and acts in the beer sector, during a session at The Market Research Event (TMRE) 2018, held in October 2018.

Armed with reams of data, Ms Hayes could bust several myths about women and beer. As she found out, there are no big gender differences in taste profiles. There is nothing to suggest that women only like the sweeter stuff. Same with the prejudice that “if you target women, men will stop listening”. It is a prejudice, full stop. Plenty of other categories, like wine and spirits, manage to address both genders just fine.

And as to the notion that women want to know less about beer than men – it is plain humbug. In fact, the idea of getting “educated” about beer is deemed condescending by women and by men.

What is keeping women away from beer, she concluded, is the largely male and sometimes intimidating culture that surrounds beer. The problem isn’t the women, or the beer, Ms Hayes said, it’s the context beer exists in. It’s a dangerous, exclusive version of masculinity, in which women exist as props and tools to sell beer, not customers to be sold to.

In order to persuade the 51 percent of the world’s population (that’s women) to drink more than 31 percent of its beers, AB-InBev is running 25 pilot projects in 15 different countries that seek to address issues that have kept women from embracing beer.

Ms Hayes and her team are well aware that it will take a long time to change perceptions and attitudes about beer.

Perhaps Ms Hayes’ research did as much to dispel beer myths, as it did to face down male beer marketers. Who was responsible for making beer culture unfriendly to women after all?

Tom Ewing, a commentator on the research website knect365.com, wrote that “it feels slightly disingenuous for AB-InBev to present on the iniquities of beer culture without holding up their hands and taking responsibility for some of it. It’s an important point to make because it raises tough questions about a mega-brewer’s commitment to shifting that culture towards something healthier. Toxic masculinity made some companies a hell of a lot of money: acknowledging that would be a start.”

I doubt that we will see this this sort of “mea culpa”. But a lot will have been gained already if Ms Hayes’ research will put her male colleagues into their place.