Stella madness

Aspirational advertising is the linking of a product to a lifestyle, if you wear this watch, drive that car or drink this drink, you can have the lifestyle that goes with it, which usually, but not always, involves becoming attractive to women. Celebrity scents give you the opportunity to smell like successful actresses and singers, although ‘Pogue – the smell of Shane MacGowan’ remains a dream sadly unrealised after it was discovered that it would infringe several patents already held by Guinness.

Produce placement in films and television means that you can link your product not just with a celebrity but with a character. The most famous product placement is probably in the James Bond franchise. Car: Aston Martin. Gun: Walther PPK. Drink: Bollinger. Drive, shoot and booze like Bond and there is a chance you too can thwart the plans of somebody with their own lair.

Advertisers want you to aspire to their product (Apple computers have actually gone one better. Famous for arranging product placement in films, the company has become the first to arrange product placement in real life. That can be the only explanation for the sheer number of hip young people ostentatiously using their products in public places) but companies and advertisers aspire to have a certain demographic using their product, which is why celebrities don’t have to hire red carpet frocks.

The flip side is that some companies don’t like certain demographics using their product. This was true of Burberry a couple of years ago when the famous check was the favoured chav garb of choice. Actually, to be more accurate, it was the mass-market label ‘knock off Burberry’ that the chavs were sporting, so as the company were seeing their upmarket brand image tarnished and not even turning a profit from it, they were understandably miffed.

But recently there has been a breakthrough from the United States (where else?) where the cast of a popular reality teevee series have been offered money not to wear a particular label. Such is the concern that the brand in question – advertised in glossy magazines as glossy upmarket preppy casual clothing for successful (i.e. white) people – is in fact sported by uncouth youth that in a desperate attempt to get loads of free advertising, the rag merchants in question made a very widely reported cash offer for the cast of the show not to wear their gear.

This gulf between the brand as it exists in the heads of the company that owns it (and, let’s face it, unless you own and operate a ‘Poundland’ shop, you hope that your cliental are going to be upmarket) and the reality is ever present, and it’s no more pronounced than in alcohol advertising.

The advertising of alcohol is bound by strict rules, alcohol is not supposed to make you funnier, or better looking, or cooler or even a better dancer (which is ironic, because that’s exactly what six pints of anything makes you think you are, even though the reality is very, very different). So the advertisers have to try to convince you to buy alcohol avoiding the usual strategy of the product making women want to shag you and men want to be you (and possibly shag you too, it’s that good a product!) and definitely avoiding actual alcoholic scenarios (young mothers guzzling chardonnay at toddler’s birthday parties, men drinking in solitude late at night) they are left with making their product fun. Oh yea, fun!!! Women have good clean fun in girly groups. Men have blokish fun in blokey groups. Rage filled incoherent rants are infrequent.

But sooner or later, the advertisers are going to have to accept that the actuality has overtaken the aspiration. And a new drink might just be the product to do it. Because just when you thought that alcohol could not get any madder, with the Japanese winning awards for their whisky, and drinks companies advertising blue cider in an attempt to market the drinking of an alcoholic beverage in a primary colour to young men rather than the traditional consumer of primary coloured alcohol – women – or the traditional consumer of something that looks and tastes like anti-freeze – tramps, Stella Artois have brought out a cider.

Advertising: For years, Stella Artois have marketing their lager as ‘reassuringly expensive’. This is a lager beer for rich people, it’s aspirational. If you can afford to pay this much to get blotto, you’re drinking to relax, rather than blot out your existence.

Reality: Stella is a foul-tasting chemical soup of a lager, famously known as ‘wifebeater’. This may be because of the effect that alcohol has on the brain, removing inhibitions and bringing our true selves closer to the surface (which for most of us means tragic dancing), or it may be because closely resembles the chemical compound that Dr Jekyll used to knock back like sherry.

Now Stella have decided that mad lager is not enough and they want to bring out a new variant. They could try a low or even no alcoholic version, but when you remove the alcoholic content from Stella, you are basically left with something that won’t get you pissed but will shift stubborn stains. So they have decided to go with…cider.


God alone knows how you market that ‘Madder than a frothing dog’? However they go, it appears to already be hit with what surely must be the key Stella cider drinking demographic – the al fresco sipper. Because let’s be clear, Stella cider will never be the tipple of choice of the bright young thing in the cocktail bar, or the cider enthusiast drinking some locally produced concoction as cloudy as Jupiter.

Stella is not actually reassuringly expensive, it’s reassuringly strong and reassuringly frequently available on special at a supermarket making it marginally cheaper than bottled mineral water. Cider is the drink of bus-stops, park benches and round the back of shops in town centres. Combining these two qualities, Stella cider is the budget binge drink of choice for gentlemen who likes: drinking out of the wind, an unpretentious approach to inebriation, shouting at ghosts.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s tradition. Which is what brewing is all about.