Beer War
This weekend, Budweiser took explicit aim the craft beer industry with their Super Bowl commercial. To mostly everyone in the craft beer world, this came as quite the surprise: what had craft brewers and craft beer drinkers done to deserve this targeting? We just want to make and drink beer that is tasty, and different; somehow, this general goal merited a targeting during the Super Bowl. This isn’t to say that the craft beer world is friendly towards macro brews, but the criticisms are valid and legitimate. And it did not take long for the craft brewers and their consumers to respond in kind: here is an article that hits the nail on the head, and here is a détournement of the commercial itself.
There are some themes in the Budweiser commercial that are quite alarming, although this ad can serve a theoretical purpose; in their baseless attack (and order watchers to stop thinking about beer and just drink it) they actually had to confirm and acknowledge something that is pushed under the rug, more often than not, in the United States: they actually had to confirm the existence of class in society. That’s right, in order to make their attack on about 8% of the beer market, they had to acknowledge the existence of class in front of millions of Super Bowl viewers.
This special edition of Theory Thursday will show how class is a matter of culture and of brand as well as how Budweiser acknowledges the concept of class. Firstly, we’ll look at how coffee brands in Canada serve as platforms and frames of action for class status, and then we’ll quickly apply these findings to the commercial.
How do Canadians consume coffee?
What could coffee have to do with beer? And what could it have to do with microbreweries in particular? Although it is not the main aim of my interest in microbreweries (see here for an introduction to my project and here for a deeper view of the main conceptual tool at play), one of the major sociological questions of craft beer is exactly who is drinking this beer; who are the ones driving the expansion of this market? And Budweiser made it fairly clear in their extremely political act of demarcating exactly who they are appealing to and what values they may hold. This question has already been answered, in part, if we extrapolate from the data and findings of other sociologists.
In 2013, Sonia Bookman¹ published an article linking the concepts of brands and class via coffee consumption in a particular Canadian city. It might seem odd, eclectic, or downright invalid, to make an abstract comparison between coffee in Canada and beer in the US, but the relationships between individuals, groups, and the product seem remarkably similar. This is because “brands are not only markers but also makers of class distinction in contemporary consumer culture.” In a common sensical way, we all know that brands are markers of class: Porsche vs Volkswagen; Armani vs Moores, and so on. Classically, in Marxism, these brands would represent and reaffirm that person’s position in the social structure/division of labour: more capital means more privilege, which translates into more devotion to distinguish yourself and your power from those who do not posses it at the same level you do. This reductionist understanding of class doesn’t explain why people would choose X brand over Y brand outside of issues of accessibility. Instead of thinking of class in this sense, we should instead elect to see our class status as constantly in flux, where class is effectively a function of our interactions. For instance, Bookman shows that people can move between relatively close classes just by changing the coffee they consume. This is because the given brand consumed acts as a frame of action, and this action determines the interaction.
In simple terms, if we look at how people consume coffee, we can see how different classes emerge, and what values these people may hold. In Canada, the most famous coffee shop is Tim Horton’s. Indeed, Tim Horton’s has become an institution in and of itself, and plays on it’s Canadianness; it’s relishes in the fact that it’s ‘Canada’s Coffee’. Tim Horton’s is the fast, accurate, no-bullshit coffee place in Canada; it really aims to be a a get in, get a coffee, and get out. Not just that however, because in most coffee shops, Tim Horton’s included, there is also a kind of specific language which makes the interaction that much more efficient, but also serves as a kind of marker for membership. If you know the lingo, you can claim that as a part of your identity. If making a coffee chain part of your identity seems strange, you have to take into account just how much and important of an institution Timmies is here: in my home town, they’ve had to install benches and picnic tables outside to keep groups of people from setting up lawn chairs in the parking lot and chilling. No joke. On a surface level this might contradict what I’ve mentioned about the speed and efficiency, but that has more so to do with the interaction at the cash than the fact that people will voluntarily sit down in a restaurant. In this way, the brand of Tim Horton’s really does in fact serve as a platform for action, wherein this action demarcates a Tim Horton’s consumer from other kinds of consumer. This is because a Tim Horton’s consumer has their own values and behaviours around the consumption of coffee.
In contrast, the other hugely popular coffee shop in Canada is Starbucks. And most of us should know on an intuitive level just what kind of person goes into a Starbucks, given that this topic is almost cliché in comedy. We’ve all heard of the ‘hipsters’ who go in to write their screenplays or novels or whatever. We’ve all heard the absurdly long and ‘pretentious’ coffee orders “skinny soy pumpkin spice vanilla latte” and so on. Though these stereotypes are really pejorative and normative in nature, they do serve to illustrate a different relation and relationship a Starbucks consumer will have as opposed to the relationships surrounding Tim Horton’s. At an establishment like Starbucks, knowledge about coffee and coffee styles from around the world are harboured and encouraged, since they are serving more ‘advanced’ or specialized forms of coffee that go far beyond the mere drip brewing; there are values of connoisseurship and cosmopolitanism. Starbucks also serves as a ‘third-place’, as Bookman notes, where white-collar workers can visit between work and home for dedicated social interactions. Starbucks are also places for sitting down and reading or getting other types of work done; indeed, there is almost an invitation for consumers to spend some of their time there. This greatly contrasts with Tim Horton’s more McDonalds style seating that is designed to be uncomfortable so that people precisely do not spend time there, which means other customers can sit down with their drinks.
Part of Bookman’s method was to interview people who consume these products, and the authors opening interview report really sums up the differences of people who consume Starbucks versus Tim Hortons:
Well first I used to go to Starbucks almost exclusively … to me, Tim Hortons was more of the blue-collar kind of working man’s kind of place, so I dismissed it. So one day a girlfriend of mine said, ‘Do you want to go for a coffee? Do you want to go to Tim Hortons?’ and I just thought, ‘Tim Hortons! I don’t think I can go in there’. I didn’t say that, but that’s what I was thinking – but I realized I shouldn’t have those biases. So I pushed through that and I walked in there and thought, ‘I’m in a different coffee land here’. There’s like, there’s different languages, there’s different ways to handle yourself, the attitude is different. I mean everything. It’s like a different place … I was a little nervous about crossing over, but I found that I loved it! That people were really down-to-earth, that they weren’t pretentious like the Starbucks clientele are. There was none of this ‘my BMW, my cellphone, I’ve got my big job downtown’, whatever. It wasn’t there. (Sheryl, healthcare professional and avid coffee consumer) (p. 183-4)
For those of us who are middle class (i.e. us who can navigate some of the boundaries between working class and upper class) who are used to doing both this might seem strange. But in reality, many people feel the same way Sheryl did, that they ‘can’t’ go into particular coffee shops because of ‘who’ they perceive themselves to be. And it’s along these lines that class is performed and demarcated.
The ‘King’ of Beers
All of this being said, I think we are now better equipped to look at how Budweiser makes the political act of demarcating a target class in their ad. To recap the content of the commercial and in order to better dissect (or should I say ‘fuss’ over) it, I will transcribe the text here:
Budweiser
Proudly a Macro Beer
It’s not brewed to be fussed over
It’s brewed for a crisp smooth finish
This is the only beer beechwood aged since 1876
There is only one Budweiser
It’s brewed for drinking, not dissecting
The people who drink our beer are people who like to drink beer
Brewed the hard way
Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale
We’ll be brewing us some golden suds
This is famous Budweiser beer
This Bud’s for you
There are several elements here that fall squarely into Bookman’s class categories. In general, we could call Budweiser the “Tim Horton’s” of the beer world, or in the words of Sheryl, the “blue-collar, working mans” beer.
The first element that I would argue is an indication of a more ‘working mans’ culture is the 2nd line, “proudly a Macro Beer.” This to me implies, but also reaffirms, the widespread availability of the beer. Because it’s Macro, it can be everywhere, which implies that the consumer can have a similar, if not exact, expectation of experience almost anywhere they go. This kind of predictability or expectation is lost in the craft beer world. People who drink craft beer relish in the diversity and uniqueness of the beers they consume. However, the fact remains that some people do not enjoy that kind of diversity or adventure in their consumer taste; they like Bud because it’s the same every time. And we can see this in the 4th line: “brewed for a crisp, smooth finish.” This is the only inherent quality of the beer that Budweiser (or any macro beer) will actually market about the beer itself. And in general, it’s what working people are after.
This point get’s driven home with lines 8 and 9. These lines together really emphasize the working class character of the beer: “brewed the hard way.” At this point in the ad, the images behind the text show sparks flying off of metal onto concrete, which is an image, might I remind Budweiser, that is completely alien to brewing; there’s no straight up manufacturing involved the the brewing process, especially not at a “macro” brewery where the process is already institutionalized and unchanging. But yet these images might be familiar to the audience that is already predisposed to drink Budweiser a great deal.
The final point I’d like to bring up is the 3rd to last line: “We’ll be brewing us some golden suds.” This is a perfect indication of the language element in the performance of cultural class along the lines of brand consumption. Just as Starbucks has a skinny vanilla latte, and Tim Horton’s has the double-double, Budweiser has it’s golden suds. Having this kind of internal language crystallizes the fact that an identity or a group membership revolves around Budweiser, because they can prove amongst themselves membership this specialized language.
Sometimes, we all just want to consume crap
So if we are to assume that class is cultural and relational in nature, and that brands provide platforms of frames wherein these cultures can take place in a concrete and interactional way, it is safe to say that cultural class demarcations also exist in the beer world. Though this happens on a different level than what we saw with coffee drinkers. When it comes to coffee in Canada there are the more blue-collar type of coffee shops like Tim Horton’s, where rapid, no-bullshit kind of interactions and products are valued, and around which communities have grown. But there are also the more middle- or upper-class establishments like Starbucks that serve as a place to visit between work and home for dedicated social interaction, that value cosmopolitanism and connoisseurship. If we were to take Bookman’s findings and apply them to the Budweiser Super Bowl commercial, we can see how this attack is really just a demarcation of a cultural class that values simplicity and intuition in it’s beer rather than diversity and quirkiness.
Despite this fact, the craft world which did not deserve this attack. They should understand that not everyone wants to drink craft beer, but that this decision is based on a matrix that is a little more complex than mere ignorance to the existence of legitimate alternatives. I should also mention that, despite how tragic it is that a brewing corporation like AnheuserBusch can have such a horrifyingly huge piece of the market share, that there is ultimately room for light industrial lagers in the beer world. As my father said, sometimes after a hockey game or after a hard days work, when you want to rehydrate with something that has a little more body to it than water or gatorade, a coors or a bud does the trick. This functions in the same way that McDonald’s is drunk food, or that pop music is dancing music; expecting people to consume nothing but 3 michelin star meals or nothing but classical music is unrealistic and awfully utopian. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make people ask for more than the same old song or burger every time or all the time; there is a compromise to be made here with a public that isn’t as open to diversity and change as we might want them to be.
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End Notes
¹ Bookman, S. (2013). Coffee brands, class and culure in a Canadian city. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 0(0), 1-19
Beyond Economic Rationality 