Staggering Stella

I often skim through a copy of The Grocer on sale in the newsagent where I work part-time. Cosmo it isn't – but it does have some very interesting articles.
For example, although I admit I enjoy a tipple myself, I was staggered (and so probably were the consumers) to learn that the UK public slurped nearly £530M of Stella Artois in 2010! That is almost half as much again as the next best-selling alcoholic drink, the horrible "Fizzy Fosters".
I have to say that I often genteelly sip a cold half of Stella on hot summer’s evening (Pimms can be too sweet for my well-worn taste buds). I suppose it is fitting that two old girls - Stella and Jane - spend the odd evening together!
And by the way, Stella is a VERY old girl. In marketing parlance, the date when anything new comes out is coined "The Product Launch Date". The same marketeers who use this kind of phraseology also often refer to the "Product Life Cycle". By that they mean how a product – such as a new alcoholic drink - sells little to start with, a lot more after a while, and much less sometime after that. For many new products, their entire "life cycle" is much less than an average human lifespan (what ever happened to Babycham or Piat D'or, for example?) but my old friend Stella seems to have entirely confounded the notion of a "normal" life cycle.
Stella’s "Product Launch" date was in fact the year 1366 - yes, an unbelievable 645 years ago!
To be fair, sales of my fav lager did go down last year by about 0.3% from the all-time high the year before, so perhaps decline did finally set-in after 644 years!
What a sad thought.
I am off to drown my sorrows - with the amount I drink, I could reverse the decline single handed!
Cheers! (My bottom is too big to go up these days!)
 

Friday, 29th July 2011

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