University of Puget Sound Sound Ideas Summer Research 2013 Not Just Sex That Sells: Religious Rhetoric and References in Contemporary Beer Branding Julie Kappelman [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/summer_research Part of the Advertising and Promotion Management Commons, Christianity Commons, and the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Kappelman, Julie, "Not Just Sex That Sells: Religious Rhetoric and References in Contemporary Beer Branding" (2013). Summer Research. Paper 203. http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/summer_research/203 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Sound Ideas. It has been accepted for inclusion in Summer Research by an authorized administrator of Sound Ideas. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract: Although explicit references to religion are rare in the marketplace, pictorial representations and rhetoric evocative of religious figures and concepts manifest a unique strategy in contemporary American beer branding. By reflecting societal views, prejudices, and preferences, advertising provides an enclosed narrative of how people think and in turn illustrates the way in which society is structured . This phenomenon discredits the assumption of a strict separation between the secular and the sacred. Beers with religious connotations do not monopolize the market but they do constitute a significant phenomenon in the modern beer industry. Religious references in beer branding often participate in the commodified authentic and cultivate an image of a nostalgic past through idyllic portrayals of monastic brewing. Alternately, beer branding via religion may employ irreverent, blasphemous, or offensive representations. Both the idealized and the indicting representations acknowledge a disparity between the real and the ideal in society. Alcohol’s association with Bacchanalian abandonment of social strictures enables recognition of the contradictions in the professed social order. Yet, in Constructive Drinking , Mary Douglas identifies “drinking as a medium for constructing the actual world” 1 and an exercise in asserting a society’s classifactory schema. The promotional material for beer vividly illustrates the way in which alcohol dually serves to shatter and renew the system and social order. Scrutiny of the two poles of religious representations described reveals that both reassert a hierarchy of humanity and regenerate the reigning social order despite popular recognition of its inconsistencies and its flaws. 1 Douglas, Constructive Drinking , 9. Not Just Sex that Sells: Religious Rhetoric and References in Contemporary Beer Branding drinking customs , running from the sacred to the profane, from silly to serious, have long reflected our values, our beliefs, and the trends in our societies. Beer is as old as civilization 2 As a marketed commodity, beer uses advertising to influence consumers’ beliefs. Branding aims to bolster the individual’s opinion of a beer. In the United States, most beer is purchased in bottles. A large percentage of the cost of a bottle of beer is invested in marketing and promotion. 3 Bamforth and other researchers have also found individuals’ professed preferences for Budweiser, Miller, or Coors are determined more by their product perceptions based on labeling than by discernible differences in taste. Similarly, Bamforth’s foam perception studies illustrate that an individual’s evaluation of a beer is not dependent upon his or her palate: “[p]eople drink with their eyes.” 4 Because the techniques employed in beer branding are so influential in determining consumer behavior and attitude, they warrant academic attention. Aside from advertisements borrowing transcendent imagery in order to imbue “an object with an aura of sacramentality” 5 to persuade the potential consumer, the domain of religion seems wholly separate from that of the marketplace. Seemingly, “most marketers realize they wouldn't have a prayer if they made overt religious references in their advertising.” 6 Like the separation of Church and State, the rituals and taboos of American capitalism seem to necessitate a separation of commerce and church. Mary Douglas’s statement that modern rituals “create[s] a lot of little sub-worlds, unrelated” 7 suggests that religion in the marketplace would be “matter out of place” within the presiding conceptualization of purity and pollution. Yet incidents of religious iconography and symbolism in beer branding surface: Buddha’s Brew, Rye-Zen-Shine, True Believer Tripel, Purgatory Pilsner, Herkules IPA, and A Mash Made in Heaven are all brews that are currently marketed. Such branding infers that alternate motives motivate these depictions beyond mere appropriation of religious rhetoric. For European beers, one may conjecture that this phenomenon derives from a historical connection: many once religious breweries that were later secularized may retain traditional nomenclature in order to cultivate an affiliation with local history and retain branding consistency. However, the use of religious iconography also emerges in the United States despite a lack of monastic history. Many denominations that arose in the United States ban or hold significantly negative attitudes toward alcohol. This attitudinal orientation in Mormonism, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and Christian Science makes connections to Christian imagery and rhetoric in contemporary American beer branding seem perplexing. To investigate the underlying reasons for these allusions requires perceiving how they are developed and portrayed. 2 Protz, Roger. “Drinking Customs.” Ed. Oliver, Garrett. The Oxford Companion to Beer (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 299-302. 299. 3 Bamforth, Charles. Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2011), 22. Bamforth, Charles. Beer: Tap Into the Art and Science of Brewing (New York: Plenum, 1998), 5-6. 4 Bamforth, Charles. Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2011), 72. 5 Sheffield, Tricia. The Religious Dimensions of Advertising (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), 3. 6 Kryhul, Angela. “Hold the Angels: Despite an Increased Interest in the Supreme Being, Overtly Religious Ads Don't Have a Prayer.” Marketing Magazine 105.9 (Mar 2000): 9. 7 Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 2002. Rpt. 1966), 85. Invocations of religious references in beer branding frequently entail mythologizing intimations of the past. As an antithesis, beer branding may also project an irreverent portrayal. From the premise that advertising reflects societal values and dynamics, one may infer that these images convey societal attitudes about religion just as advertisements reflect social conceptualizations of gender roles. Religious allusions in beer branding delineate an understanding of society, its past, its place, and its future. Two different motifs emerge regarding Christian religious references, which are particularly prevalent in beer branding. Discerning the import of these motifs requires consultation of the allusions developed in beer branding as well as brewing history and food theory. In Constructive Drinking, Douglas declares “drinks [in addition to serving as temporal markers] perform the other task of ritual. They make an intelligible, bearable world which is much more how an ideal world should be.” 8 Each perspective exhibits dissatisfied sentiments regarding the social order but similarly reveal an impetus to emulate and venerate positions of status; these expressions do not appear to culminate in an overthrow of the existent social structure. The imagery in this promotional material—in both satirized and romanticized depictions—reasserts a hierarchy of humanity. Happy Hour, Miller Time: Contextualizing Beer in Social Symbology and Food Theory Compounded with probing of how advertising reveals underlying social attitudes, a preliminary but cursory evaluation of alcohol’s relationship in society assists one’s understanding of the tenets conveyed via the food item, alcohol. Rather than being a passive participant in biological mechanisms, food signals a message towards the world. Mary Douglas states that food symbols function on a higher plane than those from other categories (such as dress) that can serve as signifiers of social structure. Because it is digestible, food is not simply a metaphor but can represent an actual transference of one thing’s properties to fundamentally change the state of the individual. Other scholars have agreed with this understanding. Michael Dietler further elaborates upon “the transformative process of ingestion into the human body. Hence, it [food] has an unusually close relationship to the person and to both the inculcation and 9 the symbolization of concepts of identity and difference in the constructions of the self." Roland Barthes also conveys this point in “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” 10 in which he shows how, within a cultural context, “superabundant [food] substances are also institutions. And these institutions necessarily imply a set of images, dreams, tastes, choices, and values […] Sugar is a time, a category of the world.” 11 In this way, food performs a preparatory role in “‘if-then’ entailments.” 12 From the presence of food (sugar), one can infer the social expectations in the setting . “Miller Time” and “Happy Hour” provide particular temporal guidelines that