However, he says times have changed. “I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Every time you do market research, consumers say ‘I want authenticity. I want stories. I want genuine’ – and then their purchasing decisions suggest they want nothing of the sort.”
The former drinks executive agrees: “I talk to my kids, the oldest ones, they love Madrí. I would say, ‘it’s marketing b——s, you know, go and drink some proper beer’. But they say, ‘we don’t care, we love it’.”
Brown puts the surprise success of Madrí in part down to timing. “I was noticing it just coming out of lockdowns on the back of the pandemic. We could get back into the pub, we were very happy that we were back out the house and were back out buying a pint.
“But if you remember two years ago, trying to get on a plane to Spain was impossible. People were going: ‘Well, I’m not going on holiday to Spain this year, but I can drink this Spanish-looking lager now I’m back in the pub’. I think that really helped them – it was the right connotations at the right time.”
The size of Molson Coors meant it can also launch drinks at a huge scale almost immediately.
“Molson Coors’ muscle in the marketplace is not to be underestimated,” adds the former drinks executive.
It didn’t hurt that big brewers had spent millions of pounds on adverts promoting the idea that Mediterranean lagers were more upmarket than “standard” beers such as Carling and Fosters. Few beer drinkers will have forgotten Stella’s “Reassuringly Expensive” slogan, which was used to advertise the brand between 1982 and 2007.