In this guest post, Chris Hackley, a Professor of Marketing at the University of London discusses 'The Grocer-isation of Alcohol Brands and the Contradictions of Alcohol Policy in the UK':
In the UK, the government first issued ‘safe’ alcohol consumption guidelines in 1987. Coincidentally, the 1980s also saw the first UK advertising campaign for alcohol to use imagery previously only seen in pre-school TV programming. The bar-cruising, wise-cracking, girl-chasing Hofmeister Bear (an actor in a trilby-wearing bear suit) became an icon of the times and a symbol of the lager-isation of Britain’s nightlife. Some 24 years later, doctors in the North East recently reported a 400% rise in hospital admissions for advanced liver disease among people in their early thirties, against a UK rise of 61%.
Coincidence? Clearly, it would be going too far to blame the UK’s alcohol problem on John Webster, advertising agency BMP DDB’s resident creative genius. For Webster, it was simply the case that his Honey Monster sold a lot of Sugar Puffs, so why not do it with beer? What is more, today, the UK advertising regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority, would probably disallow the campaign on the grounds that the imagery appeals to children.
But the juxtaposition of the two events, the Hofmeister Bear campaign and the UK government issuing drinking guidelines, neatly illustrates a contradiction in UK alcohol policy we are yet to resolve. That is, the intensification of alcohol marketing has grown hand-in-hand with the intensification of government-led initiatives to persuade people to drink less. While government convenes committees to ‘look into’ alcohol, children and young people have to negotiate a culture in which alcohol is celebrated as never before. Alcohol brands adorn major sports events and team strips; mixer drinks, which boomed in the 1980s as the notorious ‘alco-pops’, sell 40% proof vodka that tastes like fruit juice; while the country’s leading supermarket chains all treat alcohol brands as if they are normal grocery items, discounting them, promoting them heavily and stacking them in pyramids by the checkouts.
Alcohol industry lobbyists such as the Portman Group will point to the relatively small numbers of alcohol-related deaths in the UK relative to other countries. As a nation, we do not have a generalised alcohol problem in terms of consumption per capita. But we do have unusual rates of alcohol-related disease and disorder in certain socio-demographic and age groups. The rising numbers and falling age of liver disease victims seems particularly shocking, and hints at worse to come. Under current policy, they bear the whole responsibility for their predicament. They were told to drink ‘sensibly’. They didn’t. They are, in effect, collateral damage in a battle for higher profits from alcohol sales.
Over the past three decades our policy makers have assisted the alcohol industry in shifting the emphasis from steady but unexciting pub on-sales to huge volume, highly profitable, powerfully branded, 24/7, retail off-sales. This grocer-isation of alcohol brands is the elephant in the room in UK alcohol policy debates. The paralysing policy contradiction this creates needs to be acknowledged.
Chris Hackley is Professor Marketing at the School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London. He recently appeared on Channel 4 news discussing the call to review alcohol guidelines. See here for a round up on media and policy engagement in alcohol policy issues and a collection of papers here.
Recent Comments