Surging White Claw masters marketing to women, men
White Claw keeps tightening its grip on a thirsty nation, and its appeal is understandable. The alcoholic seltzer has a low calorie count, Lacroix-adjacent flavor and a meme-ability that millennials love — so much so that stores nationwide are running out, and this month the company instituted panic-inducing rationing. But while the fizzy drink is getting a generation buzzed, it’s also notso-quietly busting a glass ceiling. Unlike so many of its boozy predecessors, the Claw is equally beloved by men and women. For decades, our televisions told us that men drank beer, wom
en drank wine and that’s just the way the world was. Beer commercials, even when they’re not overtly objectifying women, often still truck in mundane male fantasy: dudes sharing brews with their bros on game day, hanging out over the grill or golfing.
Wine, meanwhile, is often sold as Mommy Juice to stressed-out ladies who escape the suburban carpool grind with slugs from labels such as Little Black Dress and Skinnygirl.
Sometimes, after years of such gendered marketing, a company will realize that it has ignored or alienated half of its potential customer base, and then overcorrect, occasionally to awkward effect. In a new Coors Light commercial, a woman is shown performing postworkday rituals that include grabbing a beer from the fridge and whipping off her bra through her sleeve. The ad dubbed Coors “The Official Beer of Being Done Wearing a Bra” — and immediately touched off a debate: Was it sexist? Relatable?
“The alcohol industry keeps shooting itself in the foot,” said Susan Dobscha, a professor of marketing at Bentley University. “It’s shortsighted to genderize an entire product category.”
White Claw, meanwhile, has sidestepped all that whiplash.
It’s huge among men and women in equal measures. There’s a clean 50-50 split in younger consumers of hard seltzer, according to a study last month by Bank of America Merrill Lynch that analyzed the drinking preferences of millennials. And according to Nielsen data, White Claw accounts for more than half of seltzer sales. Women love it. Even frat boys and the bro-iest of men love it. Comedian Trevor Wallace’s Youtube testosterone-steeped ode to White Claw (“it’s like Perrier that does squats”) has been viewed millions of times — and spawned the oft-echoed catchphrase “ain’t no laws when you’re drinking Claws!”
“You could see White Claw as the dawning of this post-gender world where millennials and Gen Z are comfortable with the idea of gender fluidity,” Dobscha said.
White Claw’s ads and social media posts feature the canned product — slimmer and taller than a traditional beer can — front and center, with men and women firmly in the backdrop. And when they do appear, they’re on equal footing.
There’s football — not on a bar TV, but rather a co-ed game being played outdoors. Women might be shown in tightfitting clothes, but it’s athletic gear or just regular beachwear, and the models look strong and fit instead of seductive.
That’s entirely intentional, says Sanjiv Gajiwala, vice president of marketing for White Claw. When the brand launched in 2016, the idea behind it was that the traditional worlds depicted in beverage marketing had pretty much gone extinct. White Claw would be the drink of the new gender norms, of the kinds of “group hangs” that define young peoples’ social lives.
“It wasn’t a world where guys got together in a basement and drank beer and women were off doing something else, drinking with their girlfriends,” Gajiwala said. “Whatever we put out creatively and how we positioned the brand really reflects that everyone hangs out together all the time.”
Hard seltzer is an entire category born catering to the millennial sensibility.
“Beer marketers have been trying to crack the code of being gender-neutral after years of ignoring half the population,” said Harry Schuhmacher, editor and publisher of Beer Business Daily. “Big brewers haven’t really been able to do it, but then White Claw came in, and it’s always been a genderneutral thing.”
Over the summer, it seemed that White Claw morphed from a mere drink into a full-on lifestyle. What started out as “Hot Girl Summer” was re-dubbed “White Claw Summer,” a selfies-by-the-pool, hashtagged shorthand for good times.