As the founder of the eight-year-old company Women Enjoying Beer, Ginger Johnson knows a bit about how marketing affects female drinkers.
And when Johnson arrives in Denver to promote her new book in the week leading up to the Oct. 6-8 Great American Beer Festival, she plans to deliver a very blunt message about the messages some brewers are throwing at her: Stop offending women drinkers with sexual innuendo and actually talk about the flavor and story of your product.
“If a product can’t focus on its merits, it shouldn’t be in the marketplace,” Johnson said in an interview regarding the book, “How to Market Beer to Women: Don’t Sell Me a Pink Hammer.” “A lot of times beer marketing is something that repels instead of attracts.”
A hardware-industry executive who came to love beer while hanging out with friends at a brewpub in her home state of Oregon, Johnson points to this statistic: Among adults who consume alcoholic beverages, 70 percent of males drink beer, but only 30 percent of females do.
Women, she said, want to be educated by a product’s marketing. Discussions about its tastes, its origins, the people who make it all attract them to want to try a product.
Johnson also says that successful outreach on beer avoids overly broad descriptions such as “good,” “bad,” “light,” “dark” and “heavy” that are subjective to everyone’s own palate. Speaking directly to flavors will allow consumers to make up their own minds.
Johnson, who consults through her company and speaks often on beer/food pairing, also dispels that there are female flavors, like lighter or fruitier beers. Women are just as likely as men to drink a complex, bitter double IPA if they understand the flavor and appreciate it, she said.
“It’s absolutely ludicrous that people think flavor would have a gender,” she said. “Gender and flavor are not connected ... Nobody is conditioned to like or not like anything.”
And she also argues against the idea that the small number of women-owned or women-operated breweries naturally do a better job of marketing to females.
No brewer should ask a woman to drink their beer just because it’s the product of someone of the same sex as her, just as no one says, “I’m a man who owns this brewery, so men should drink this beer,” Johnson said.
In fact, when asked for a Colorado example of a company that markets beer well to females, Johnson pointed to Longmont’s Left Hand Brewing, an employee-owned company overseen by co-founder Eric Wallace. Wallace may have a Y chromosome, but his brewery also has a group called Ales For Females that hosts thrice-monthly meetings only for women drinkers, run by Left Hand’s tasting room manager and Eric’s wife, Cinzia Wallace.
Recent topics for the group included an examination of German lagers — a talk given by a male, in fact — as well as discussions of Prohibition and of early colonial beer efforts.
In other words, Johnson noted, they’re talks about beer, without fluff and without efforts to sex it up.