Coors: no longer seeing the Light in the UK

Insight. Strategy. Naming.

After years of hammering home the icy-chilled refreshment message and shipping Van Damme to ever more glacial climes and higher altitudes, the UK Coors team has now won its (apparently very long and bitter internal battle) and succeeded in shedding its Light descriptor. 

While it’s easy to say the original Coors Light name was just a case of US parents foisting a ‘one size fits all’ strategy onto the rest of the world (and the brand’s name has certainly spent many years being at odds with its relentless ‘cold’ message), it’s also fair to say that any vestige of cultural relevance and resonance that may have existed in ‘Light’ as a category has been repositioned by the market and cultural sea changes happening around it 

First, we’ve seen any relevance to the Light title (originally lighter at 4%ABV versus the premium higher ABV norm of the noughties) being undermined in the growth of both mid strength sessioning table beers and the unstoppable (more recent) rise of the NOLO category. Increasingly, the descriptor simply made no sense, or at worse, could be seen to mislead.

Second, ‘Light’ as a wider category - once the province of healthier choices - has, of late, seen a falling out of favour: being often seen both as reductive, stripped of full taste and a pale imitation of the genuine article.

Third - and related to the falling out of favour with Light - is the consumer move to favour clean and simple, ‘made of real’ (boosted by the growth in craft) ingredients in food and drink. Here the growing prevailing wisdom is that if a Light beer were to even taste good it would likely be by dint of it being tampered with, or simply pumped with additives, to make up for loss of the ‘real stuff’.

Finally, there has always been an unhappy fit between the beer category and Lightness. For a category which still - despite craft and a growing female drinking audience – remains a male stronghold and a symbolic pleasure, Lightness more often seems emasculating: the province of diet, weight-loss and far away from the pleasure-filled moment of reward that a crisp, chilled beer offers to most drinkers. 

In many ways I think that the illogic of Coors Light with its product reality grew to fit the brand and almost transcend the contradiction of its naming. This is in no small part down to consistent, stand out advertising and distinctive brand assets. It will be interesting to see whether the shift to simply Coors in the UK will boost its fortunes or, like other idiosyncratic or unformulaic brands, whether some drinkers may feel it has ‘lost’ something more than its descriptor.