Bring on the Beer!

OK so I may be jinxing it, but according to the last two days of sunny weather, summer has officially arrived! What does this mean for me? A LOT of barbeques. There is nothing Caribbean people like more than getting together to eat, talk, hang out and yes, drink. 

What I couldn’t help but notice for the second time this weekend (yep I had two barbeques) was that the beer Red Stripe was being passed around. So I had to ask people why that is their beer of choice, seeing as it is a brewed in Jamaica and hard to find in Vancouver. I got a lot of, “This is what I drank when I was growing up”, or there was a proud Jamaican who said “There’s no other beer in the world!” But funnily enough, it was hard to get a concrete answer directly relating the taste of the beer to why they drink it. It seemed to be more a matter of habit or pride. When asked if they drink Heineken or Corona, I got all yeses, but when I asked if they would pick up a Heineken or Corona over a Red Stripe, I got a resounding NO. Mind you, the majority of this crowd was Jamaican so my unofficial focus group results are a little skewed.

Regardless, it made me wonder how much marketers tap into the nostalgic and habitual aspects of human behaviour to hook someone onto a product. Would I be so attached to Tide if they didn’t have commercials of mothers getting out those unruly stains of their children like I used to watch my mother do? Or switch to the brand Puffs tissues because they show the caring mother doing what she can to sooth a child’s runny nose; which in turn makes me miss the winter my grandma would meet me at the door with a tissue to wipe my nose.

In some ways it almost seems wrong. How dare these companies tap into my childhood memories and get me hooked on these products?? But as an aspiring marketer I must say I am impressed. It’s not something I overly noticed before but after my Red Strip focus group I am more aware of what I will now call the ‘nostalgic method of marketing’.

Kudos to those firms out there who have mastered this technique. Now every time I buy something I’m going to be searching my brain for what type of memory it may or may not be bringing to the surface. But for the company’s sake they better hope it’s a good one!