Alcohol Industry Brands Report

According to the alcohol industry trade body WSTA, the UK alcohol industry was worth a total of £40.3bn in annual sales in 2016.

That’s a lot of spend to play for, and much of it is brand driven.

When you’re being jostled at a busy bar on a Friday night, do you take the time to stare at the myriad bottles behind a flustered bartender, or do you instinctively order the brand that’s top of your mind?

Do you buy the brand that’s familiar and trusted when you’re at the supermarket? When a waiter lists what beers they have on tap, do you order the most familiar one because it’s the easiest to remember?

For many consumers, the answer to those questions is more often than not ‘yes’ – and this is why alcohol brands plough tens of millions into ‘above the line’ advertising campaigns across TV, radio and billboards as well as digital.

To capture a share of this lucrative market, it’s essential to be well known, and well liked.

So which brands are winning across those two major criteria, and what else can we learn about the alcohol industry from Attest’s first Alcohol Brand Index?

Fragmented

This is a fragmented market, with 192 different brands mentioned.

A brand had to have 0.7% of unprompted brand recall to be in the Top 20 brands, and 2.1% to be in the Top 10.

For our leadership matrix, we focused on the top 17 brands, who all had an unprompted brand recall of at least 1% and above.

Within that leadership matrix, we can see that beers is the dominant category when it comes to brand recognition, with 7 beers named: Fosters, Budweiser, Stella Artois, Carling, Carlsberg, Guinness and Heineken.

The next most competitive category with multiple brands named was vodka, where Smirnoff, Absolut and Ciroc were all in the Top 17.

Cider was the only other category to have two brands named, with Strongbow and Kopparberg both receiving enough mentions to propel them into the top.

In every other category, there was just one clear winner:

Jack Daniels for Whiskey; Gordon’s for Gin; Bacardi for Rum; Baileys and Malibu rounding out the more speciality liqueurs.

Interestingly not a single wine brand had a brand recall of 1% or more, and neither did brandy or cognac.

Well liked

A positive takeaway for the industry is how well liked it is overall.

The industry’s average Net Promoter Score (NPS) was a healthy 31.1%.

This was higher for males (33.3%) and a little lower for females (31), but fairly consistent.

Looking at different age groups, it takes a dip down to 25.2 for Gen Z (21 and under), rising to 28 for Millennials (22-35), then leaping up to 40.7 for Gen X (36-55) and then reducing back to 39.1 amongst Boomers (55+).

Interestingly those living in London gave the lowest average NPS across the UK (just 19.9), while those living in the East Midlands were most positive, averaging a score of 50.

This suggests there is more work to be done by alcohol brands to win over younger audiences and those in the capital, where a trend towards a more health conscious lifestyle has very much taken hold.

Strong purchase intent

Another key takeaway from the data is how strong a correlation there is between knowing a brand and the likelihood that consumers are likely to buy it.

53.4% of consumers were ‘very likely’ to purchase from a brand they could name, with a further 27.5% ‘likely’ to do so.

This stays relatively consistent across ages, gender and locations.

The major factor affecting purchase intent is Net Promoter Score (NPS).

For brands with an NPS of 6 or below, a ‘very unlikely’ to buy purchase intent shoots up to 25% (from an average of just 5.7%), while ‘unlikely’ also increased from an average of 3% to 11.5%.

This goes to show the importance of measuring NPS for alcohol brands.

Key attributes

What do consumers want in a top alcohol brand? As you can see from our wordcloud, the top 3 attributes are: Taste, Quality and Refreshing.

These were also the top words used to describe alcohol brands with an NPS of 9 and 10.

Alcohol Index Leaders

The overall leaders of our first Alcohol Brand Index were as follows:

You can see how this looks plotted as both Total Brand Equity (TBE) and against the matrix of ‘well known and well liked.’

A few quick takeaways

What can we learn from the above index?

Firstly, being well known doesn’t automatically mean being well liked. While Carlsberg is the 7th most well known brand, it sits 17th for TBE because of it’s weak purchase intent and NPS scores. Heineken doesn’t fare much better.

However a brand like Kopparberg, which not only outperforms big hitters like Magners and Bulmers for brand recall, starts to overtake more well known brands on the Total Brand Equity list by having such strong NPS and purchase intent. It only just sits behind Strongbow overall.

So while awareness is incredibly important, brand reputation has a big impact too.

Smirnoff sits comfortably at the top of the table in terms of both unprompted brand awareness and Total Brand Equity.

This will be good news for parent company Diageo, which has increased its marketing spend across all its brands to a whopping £1.8 billion. Baileys and Guinness – both Diageo owned – are two other beneficiaries of this increased spending.

Jack Daniel’s, with its seemingly ever-present Tube ads, is a strong second in the table.

In other words, to win big in this category, you’ve got to spend big.

It’s a very cluttered field, which means in order to stand out you have to have a consistent (and near-constant) brand strategy with the advertising budget to back it up.

In conclusion

The alcohol sector is a tough one to crack, but the rewards for doing so are extremely rich.

Recall is strongly correlated to purchase intent, with NPS being the other major factor.

Measuring these key metrics will help you to figure out which aspects of your brand need to be worked on so you can stay (or break into) the top echelons.

And if your brand wasn’t featured, we can help you run a tailored brand equity matrix specific to your category or target consumer (e.g. just for craft ales, or just for flavoured liqueurs).

Get in touch with us to learn more.