Football and music hits the right note

The main characteristic of the lager market over the last 20 years has been the amount of money thrown at it.

While TV and cinema advertising remains a major part of the marketing mix, sponsorship has come to be a more focused way of reaching target markets.

For standard lager, this tends to mean men, and younger ones in particular.

Iain Paton, Carlsberg-Tetley's director of brands, notes that "85% of 18 to 34-year-olds state football as their number one passion, either watching it, playing it or talking about it".

No surprise then that football is where Carlsberg spends most of its sponsorship cash, with links to England and the FA Cup, plus Hibernian FC in Scotland.

Paton adds: "The pub environment is ideal in making the most of the opportunity.

"We saw that with the World Cup last year where pubs did breakfast and people started drinking."

Of course, there is no big soccer tournament this summer, just the Premier League Asia Cup ­ highlight: Malaysia ver-sus Chelsea ­ but Paton is not deterred.

He says: "We're noticing that every time we get a big tournament, lager sales go up but they continue to go up after it's finished."

The Premiership sponsorship helped with Carling's brand awareness in fairly recent times, but it's now switched to music in a big way, with the Home-coming concerts, venue sponsorships and all manner of music press activity.

Brand director Des Johnson says: "It gives us a great opportunity to get the brand and the category in front of lager drinkers.

"If we don't fix recruitment now, it will bite us all in 20, 30 or 40 years' times.

Music really is a way of getting under the skins of core consumers.