Society & Culture - Posted by Lisa Chedekel-Boston U. on Tuesday, February 26, 2013 13:14 - 4 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Underage drinkers prefer the same brands
Close to 30 percent of underage youths surveyed reported drinking Bud Light, 17 percent had consumed Smirnoff malt beverages, and about 15 percent reported drinking Budweiser in the past 30-day period. (Credit: Ivy Dawned/Flickr)
BOSTON U. / JOHNS HOPKINS (US) — Of nearly 900 brands of alcohol, only 25 of them make up half of the alcohol underage drinkers in the US are consuming, a new study shows.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
Bud Light, Smirnoff, and Budweiser share a distinction that may make their corporate owners wince: they are among a relatively small number of alcohol brands that underage drinkers choose most. In contrast, adult consumption is much more widely spread among different brands.
This is the first national study, published online in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, to identify the specific alcohol brands underage youth drink. The study authors say that it has important implications for alcohol research and policy.
“We now know, for the first time, what alcohol brands—and which companies—are profiting the most from the sale of their products to underage drinkers,” says study lead author Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University’s School of Public Health.
“The companies implicated by this study as the leading culprits in the problem of underage drinking need to take immediate action to reduce the appeal of their products to youth.”
Close to 30 percent of underage youths surveyed reported drinking Bud Light, 17 percent had consumed Smirnoff malt beverages, and about 15 percent reported drinking Budweiser in the past 30-day period.
Of the top 25 consumed brands, 12 were spirits brands (including 4 vodkas), 9 were beers, and 4 were flavored alcohol beverages.
The researchers surveyed 1,032 young people, ages 13 to 20, using an Internet-based questionnaire. Respondents were asked about their past 30-day consumption of 898 brands of alcohol, spread among 16 alcoholic beverage types, including the frequency and amount of each brand consumed.
The brands with the highest rates of consumption among underage drinkers were: Bud Light (27.9 percent), Smirnoff Malt Beverages (17.0 percent), Budweiser (14.6 percent), Smirnoff Vodkas (12.7 percent), Coors Light (12.7 percent), Jack Daniel’s Bourbons (11.4 percent), Corona Extra (11.3 percent), Mike’s (10.8 percent), Captain Morgan Rums (10.4 percent), and Absolut Vodkas (10.1 percent).
“Importantly, this report paves the way for subsequent studies to explore the association between exposure to alcohol advertising and marketing efforts and drinking behavior in young people,” says David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a study author.
Similar to smoking
Alcohol is responsible for 4,700 deaths a year among young people under the age of 21. More than 70 percent of high school students have consumed alcohol, past studies indicate, and about 22 percent engage in heavy episodic drinking. At least 14 studies have found that the more young people are exposed to alcohol advertising and marketing, the more likely they are to drink—or if they already drink, to drink more.
The researchers note that scientific literature lacks studies examining the link between youth exposure to advertising for specific brands and the consumption of those brands. “That is exactly the direction we are going with this research,” Siegel says. “We are now in the process of collecting the data, and our next step will be to examine the relationship between the advertising data and youth brand preferences.”
The research examining alcohol marketing to youth, he says, is similar to earlier work done around smoking, which identified certain companies that were specifically trying to target young smokers.
After years of pressure from antismoking groups and the Federal Trade Commission, the Camel brand ended its popular cartoon-based “Joe Camel” campaign in 1997. In 1998, the major US tobacco companies and 46 states signed a settlement agreement that specifically banned targeting youth.
“It was this line of research, into the relationships between brand-specific advertising and underage smoking, that provided the strongest evidence that marketing was affecting youth habits,” Siegel says. The study authors say their work could similarly inform policy efforts to reduce underage drinking.
“Alcohol prevention programs and policies can now target specific brands, and advocacy efforts can focus on specific companies that manufacture the products most involved in problem drinking behavior among youth,” they write in the study.
Siegel says that one surprising finding of the new study was that several brands of flavored alcohol—among them Smirnoff’s malt and Mike’s—were very popular with young drinkers, yet not similarly favored by adults.
“It really begs the question: what is it about these brands that makes them disproportionately popular among underage drinkers?” Siegel says. “We want to look into the reasons—and certainly one of the potential reasons is marketing.”
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism supported the research.
Source: Boston University
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4 Comments
Tom Thumb
Mick Alonso
Is this supposed to be a serious study? Where’s the hidden camera? Of course most teens will drink the most available, most sweet, booze. It doesn’t take a million dollar study to work that one out.. But then again you can get a grant for any silly study.
Les
But what to do about it? Any marketing aimed at 21 year olds is likely to appeal to teenagers – especially older teens and 20yos.
It would be interesting to see if there is any change in preference between the younger and older youth, say 13-16 and 17-20.
Andarb
One of the most important things a good parent should teach their teens is how to drink. Now, I don’t mean how to binge, but to allow a limited experience with alcohol in a controlled environment, and to teach their teens that alcohol, in moderation, isn’t a bad thing. Just telling kids not to drink won’t ever work.
It’s not unlike putting a child on a diet – a hunger diet, not a healthy diet where they can eat enough to be comfortable – they learn bad habits and try to hide indulging instead.
Please … teens are going to drink and they’re going to gravitate towards what’s easiest to get, cheapest, and tastes sweetest and/or more like water. Teens drink to get drunk, not because of a brand. And they get drunk to try on different social personas. Changing marketing isn’t going to change this behavior and changing brands is just spreading things around.