I did a search on coors and scotland and found this.
Evicting the Tennent's
Source: mad.co.uk | Author: By Jim Butcher | Published: 21 April 2004 09:00Evicting the Tennent's Carling rules the roost as the number one lager in England, having firmly established itself in the national psyche with its highly successful association with England's twin passions of music and football. But can a drink so closely associated with the Auld Enemy break down Scottish barriers to compete with firm favourite Tennent's?
Brewed in England for more than 30 years, Carling is the country's biggest-selling beer bar none. Over one billion pints of it are drunk every year, and was the first beer to achieve sales of over 4.5 million barrels per annum.
Backed by massive marketing support, responsible for producing some of the best loved ads ever to grace TV screens over the past decade, it is sold in over 36,000 pubs and clubs and accounts for one in five pints of lager sold in England. It is, to all intents and purposes, a beer monster.
But peering across the northern border it is a very different story. In fact up until a year ago, you'd have more chance seeing a Scot donning an England shirt and belting out "Three Lions" than you would a Glaswegian pub serving its southern cousins' favourite beer.
This isn't simply, as you might be led to thinking, because of the Scots' long-held disdain for their southern neighbours. They may not be first to the bar to order a Carling, this much is true, but the reason is as much to do with the brewery's conflict of interest as it is with Caledonian contempt for the Sassenachs.
The problem of introducing Carling to a highland audience stemmed from a somewhat convoluted buy-out process between rival breweries. Bass Brewers owned both Tennent Caledonian Breweries (producer of number-one Scottish lager Tennent's) and Carling Brewers, the makers of Carling, so for years it was felt that pitching the two similar medium-strength lager brands up against one another would be counter productive.
However all this changed when Belgian giant Interbrew bought Bass for £2.3 billion in the Summer of 2000. A six-month battle ensued after the Government stepped in to rule that the deal was anti-competitive on the grounds the brewer controlled 32 per cent of the market share. Interbrew successfully appealed to the High Court but was still forced to make concessions, and after much wrangling decided to give up its English operations while holding onto its business in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
This eventually led to it grudgingly ditching Carling Brewers, and selling it on to US brewer Coors at the end of 2001 for around £1.2 billion, after it beat off strong competition from Dutch-based Heineken.
So after much wheeler-dealing Carling, which had enjoyed so much success in England, finally found itself in a position with new owner Coors where it could be launched in Scotland. Coors is no stranger to what is a relatively conservative Scottish drinking market, having gained experience through a small commercial team based in Scotland who were promoting Coors Light.
Des Johnson On the 3 January 2003, Coors officially announced Carling's attack on the Scottish lager market. However certain problems remained as to how the brewer would market a lager that a significant section of Scots regarded as very much English.
Campaigns of the Nineties had focused on instilling a strong patriotic association with Carling - take the famous "bouncing bomb" campaign in the 90s, where German swimmers attempted to stop a Carling beer wrapped in a towel from reaching the sun-bed, or the "French strikers" ad where a car evaded French blockades to cross the Channel. Indeed, Carling's brand director Des Johnson admits that convincing the Scots they shouldn't be wary of the lager was considered something of a challenge.
"Those campaigns were very definitely intended to convey Britishness as opposed to Englishness," he says. "But the reality was if you put yourself in the shoes of the Scottish consumers, they perceived us as an English brand."
This isn't surprising as despite the lager generally being unavailable in Scotland, the ads were still played north of the border, at a time when English patriotism was running at fever pitch, with Euro '96 and Carling's sponsorship of the English Premiership further helping to ostracise Caledonian drinkers. "Even now many Scots still see Carling as an English brand. Our job is to position ourselves as British, not English," said Johnson.
To achieve this, Coors felt it had to strike at the heart of the Scottish mindset - and for the marketing team at Coors that translated into one thing - football. So it was that in its launch season, Carling shook up the market by announcing it was be the new shirt sponsor of Glasgow teams Celtic and Rangers in a landmark £12 million three-year deal. And in a cheeky swipe at its new rivals, Tennent's was even banned from being sold at Old Firm grounds where it had been consumed for nearly a century. The deal certainly put Carling on the map, and over the year Carling's strategy of supporting English music was also transferred across the border. Glasgow's defunct New Bedford Cinema was renovated into a Carling Academy music venue, with the city's Scottish Exhibition Conference Centre also given brand support.
Still, the marketing team have been careful not to alter the lager's brand values when promoting Carling in Scotland. "We haven't changed anything," insists Johnson, "If we had, it might have come across as pandering or being slightly disingenuous. We'd never, say, run an anti-England campaign around Euro 2004 in Scotland as it wouldn't be right - even if it did prove popular with some!"
Only a small part of Carling advertising so far has been Scotland-specific, so as to maintain the British-themed feel.
"We did some responsible drinking advertising in December, which we'll repeat in May, featuring Old Firm football coaches Martin O'Neill and Alex McLeish as spokesmen," said the brand director. "But that's been the only separate advertising we've used. Other than that our recent Carling Extra Cold work is running in both countries, as is our new 500-a-side shirts versus skins ad."
Being the largest city in Scotland, Glasgow was the natural choice to focus on campaign-wise, but it is also one of the toughest regions to crack in terms of its drinker's allegiance to Tennent's, for so long the country's dominant lager brand.
"We researched within Glasgow and Edinburgh and there are differences, but they're not as great as some might think," he reveals. "Tennent's has a much stronger appeal in Glasgow as it's a Glasgow lager, but to both groups we were seen as an English lager, for sure."
In terms of attitude towards Carling, researchers found, there was a three-way split amongst drinkers. "Around a third of people rated Carling, thought it was a decent pint, and who maybe had worked or studied in England. Thumbs up. There was another section who felt the jury was still out and didn't know enough about it, like 'I might try it, I might not'. And there was we found a third who couldn't see themselves touching it at all."
Paul Miller But such a split in views hasn't stopped Carling making decent in-roads into pubs thus far. Critically, Carling's target 18 to 24 year-old audience are the most open to trying the lager, and this has been reflected in the decision of city clubs and bars to begin selling it.
Currently, over 1000 venues sell Carling on tap, representing ten per cent of the total number of pubs and clubs in Scotland. This is no mean feat as Paul Miller, Carling sales director for Scotland, can readily testify. "We recognised that the market in Scotland was slightly different, and we were starting with a blank sheet of paper," he says.
"In the off-trade our tactics were fairly consistent with the way Coors would target in England and Wales, except in some elements of the promotional activity such as with the Old Firm sponsorship and so on."
However the on-trade sector differed significantly. For instance, Scottish brewers have tended to be more focused on directly supplied accounts. "But we're looking to build Carling as a brand in Scotland," says Miller, "to have a sales and support team regardless of whether Carling is being bought direct, through wholesalers or other third parties. It's not just about direct supply accounts."
There has also been a stringent focus on quality as Carling is introduced to each new outlet, with great efforts made to ensure that as a new entrant standards remain as high as possible.
Miller explains the danger that if a consumer buys a pint of Carling and it's not satisfactory, they won't have a benchmark for it and may never touch a drop again. But if they have a bad pint of Tennent's they'll know it's off so would simply blame it on the outlet - Carling, he says, simply doesn't have that luxury. "As a new player we've got to be adding value and raising standards," insists Miller. As a result Coors have invested heavily in its Carling support team - a technical back-up team - who provide a quarterly pro-active maintenance call, making sure everyone's comfortable serving the lager and making any technical changes or tweaks if necessary. "It really is quite a significant investment from us in an effort to raise the bar of quality. Traditionally brewers would only come out when the publican had a problem. No one else out there is offering that."
Coors realises that it must pull out all the stops to break the dominance of Interbrew and Scottish & Newcastle, which owns McEwans and Miller, the other major Scottish lager brands. The two brewers enjoy something of a duopoly, controlling as they do around 70 per cent of the market, and it's something the sales manager is looking to change.
"The brands were built around a core supply chain, successfully exploiting the routes to market," he explains. "We've taken a different route, focusing on the consumer and delivering a quality product to provide a positive choice as well as an emotional connectivity amongst consumers."
Current distribution figures are encouraging. Carling has gone from being sold in less than 30 per cent of off-trade outlets to 90 per cent in just over a year. Current Nielsen figures suggest Coors is shifting around 100 gallons per month per pub at the moment, already twice that of Stella, according to Coors.
"We've gone from a zero start to being the seventh biggest lager in Scotland within the space of a year," boasts Johnson, who says marketing spend for 2004 will be bolstered to capitalise on this year's success. Coors' near-term ambition is to take the number two slot from Miller within three to five years, with Johnson for one feeling Carling has a chance of knocking on Tennent's door within a decade.
"We're going to be giving Tennent's a good run for its money, that's for sure," says Johnson, "and that can only come through a consistent investment in the marketplace. We're certainly not in it for a big splash in year one before disappearing off into the sunset."
An interesting gauge of what challenges lie ahead for Coors will be how much extra Carling is consumed north of the border during the upcoming Euro 2004 tournament in Portugal. Scotland is staying at home after failing to qualify, but whether the England-baiting natives will be happy drinking what some might still regard as "foreign" beer whilst baying for Anglo-Saxon blood remains to be seen.
Englishman Johnson, however, remains professional to the last. "Whoever the Scots support," he muses, "be it France, Switzerland, or whoever else England has to play - they might as well do it with a Carling in their hand."
Still nothing on where the vat came from, though. You wonder if it's one they were shipping into Scotland or England for the Carling facilities or for something new. I also saw a more recent story that they introduced a new Ale in the Scottish market this year (New Coors ale in Scottish market), so maybe they've given up on the Carling push in Scotland that this article is talking about.