BrewDog’s pink ‘Beer for Girls’ sparks outrage
(Twitter/brewdog and others)
BrewDog has caused outrage with its new “Beer for Girls,” which is packaged in pink.
The beer brand explained during the launch of its new “Pink IPA” that the drink had been “satirically dubbed” and was intended to fight against the 20 percent gender pay gap in the UK.
In its press release, BrewDog said that the campaign was “a send-up of the lazy marketing efforts targeting the female market.”
(Twitter/brewdog)
They added that “lazily targeting the female market with sub-par products designed by expensive research are inherently patronising.
“Depicting women in wholly unacceptable ways on labels is something we do not condone, and creating concepts that undermine women’s ability to enjoy beer (ANY beer) is both short sighted and restricts progression.”
Customers who identify as women will be able to buy the drink for 20 percent less than men, and for the next four weeks, 20 percent of the proceeds will go to the Women’s Engineering Society and economic equality group 9to5.
(BrewDog)
Sarah Warman, BrewDog’s head of marketing, said: “We want to accelerate change by empowering more women to make their voices heard and calling out industries and employees that need to do more.
“With Pink IPA, we are making a statement the only way we know how – with beer.”
Another line from BrewDog’s marketing team reads: “Pink IPA might look different on the outside, but it’s exactly the same on the inside. Just like the female workforce.”
(BrewDog)
It should be noted that women are often – though not always – different inside.
An hour and 20 minutes after BrewDog’s original tweet launching its “beer for equality,” the company tweeted using the hashtag #Sarcasm in an apparent effort to make its motives clear.
“We’ve created a beer for girls. And it’s pink. Because women only like pink and glitter, right? ♀️ #Sarcasm Lets show that enough is enough with stereotypes,” it wrote.
(Twitter/brewdog)
But these apparent good intentions around the beer, released ahead of International Women’s Day on Thursday, failed to soften reactions to the pink bottle emblazoned with “BEER FOR GIRLS”.
One person wrote on Twitter: “Not cool BrewDog not cool. Whilst the idea is great, sadly the execution is a big miss.”
They continued: “also a quote from the article – ‘Lazily targeting the female market with sub-par products designed by expensive research are inherently patronising.’ you realise this is pretty much what you are doing.”
(Twitter/georgina_breeze)
They added: “you have taken one of your existing products, just put a pink label on it, cause ‘oh we think women like pink’ and label it ‘Beer for Girls’ this seems like you are jumping on the bandwagon of #InternationalWomensDay, you could have stepped up to the mark so much better.”
Another person also criticised what they saw as hypocrisy from BrewDog.
“‘Lazily targeting the female market with sub-par products designed by expensive research are inherently patronising,'” they quoted.
(Twitter/L_Houston_)
“What, you mean like repackaging the EXACT SAME BEER with a pink label and calling it ‘beer for women’? ”
One person rejected the campaign’s claim that its new product was satirical.
“When someone’s job is to get people to buy a product, and they use an image as marketing, the image needs to convey as much as possible in one glance,” they said.
(Twitter/saybwee)
“This doesn’t say ‘satire’ to me. It just says ‘why hire women to market to women when we can just talk down to them instead.'”
Another said: “Oh dear. This is like when teenagers discover sarcasm.
(Twitter/CaptainLibatron)
“Marketing pink beer at women in order to call out other people marketing pink beer at women isn’t ‘satirical’. It’s marketing pink beer at women.”
Yet another detractor wrote: “We didn’t ask for pink beer. We didn’t ask for less noisy crisps. We didn’t ask for pink tool sets”.
“What we want is:
Pockets in clothing
The ability to occupy an entire single train seat without trespassing knees
Zero unwanted lecherous attention
Strawberry cake
Posh gin”.
(Twitter/listrott)
Seems fair enough.
Watch BrewDog’s video below:
