South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Drink is more than bubbly buzz
Hard seltzer White Claw’s appeal busts long-accepted norms
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 the company instituted panicinducing rationing.
But while the fizzy drink is getting a generation buzzed, it’s also not-soquietly 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 and women drank wine. 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 post-workday 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,” says Susan Dobscha, a professor of marketing at Bentley University. “It’s shortsighted to genderize Hard seltzer, including the wildly popular White Claw, is projected to top $1 billion in sales by the end of the year.
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. 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 says.
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 coed game being played outdoors. Women might be shown in tight 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,” says Harry Schumacher, 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 gender-neutral thing.”
Danelle Kosmal, vice president of Nielsen’s beverage alcohol practice, sees hard seltzer as one of the few beverages that’s managed to pull off this feat.
“Hard seltzer is one of the most gender-neutral products we have seen across the alcohol industry,” she said in an email. “In comparison, traditional beer drinkers are two times more likely to be men than women.” And the relatively new drink is gaining on beer: A recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch study found that it accounts for 5 percent of the beer market.
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.
“It’s aspirational,” says Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Bryan Spillane, of hard seltzers’ low-sugar, low-calorie appeal to younger drinkers — men and women — who want to party beachside and care how they look doing it. It’s also gluten-free. “It’s the whole low-carb, ketofriendly, CrossFit life.” And even drinkers who aren’t hardcore health nuts buy in. “They might be keto in their minds,” Spillane says. “It’s aspirational, in ways that have nothing to do with gender.”
Communities have sprung up around White Claw. Ashley Schmillen is a member of the Facebook group Phish Fans Who Love White Claw, a page started by a friend of hers this summer as a joke that’s now up to more than 4,500 members. The group posts lyrics from the jam band — altered, of course, with references to their favorite drink. They mark one another’s birthdays by posting videos of themselves shotguning Claws.
Members of the group are genuinely passionate about the drink —but Schmillen, a 34-year-old stay-homemom from Minneapolis, says they’re just as into the shared humor of it all.
“They’re there for the jokes,” says Schmillen, who has an Etsy shop where she sells stickers and tank tops bearing the group’s name.
“There’s this balancing act between it being a meme and it being a real thing,” says Don Carter, an engineer in Los Angeles. Although he approaches the drink with a bit of irony, he appreciates its convenience. As an exclusive vodka-and-soda drinker, he says, he has welcomed finding cans of White Claw at parties. “Usually you’d go to a barbecue and there’s just beer - so it fits the bill there.”
Some forecasters suspect that overall, hard seltzer sales might fall off a bit in cooler weather. But there’s no indication that the fizzy party is close to being over. According to data from Nielsen, sales are projected to top the $1 billion mark by the end of 2019.
The end of summer brings tailgates, Halloween parties and holiday revelry or in the language of White Claw’s marketing department, plenty more chances for a coed group hang.