A study that explores the beer-purchasing power of a cohort of South African Generation Y consumers was recently made public by Dr Chris Pentz of the Department of Business Management who initiated the work in collaboration with honours student Justin Wilson.

Generation Y cohorts, also known as Millennials, are those people born between the years 1980 and 1995. This segment makes out a big percentage of South Africa's society, is entering the full-time workforce and, perhaps most importantly, spending their disposable income.

The study, which started in 2018, sampled the consumption habits of 109 regular beer and 109 light beer Generation Y drinkers at Stellenbosch University. Of the 218 students sampled, 70% were between the ages of 21 and 23, 26% bought beer two to three times a month and 25% once a week, while 71% of females preferred light beer and 66% of males preferred regular beer.

According to Pentz, despite being associated with binge drinking, Generation Y consumers appear to be altering their preferences toward light alcoholic beverages, such as light beer.

South African brewery giant SAB InBev has recently acknowledged that the shift in drinking patterns has compelled the firm to increase its no- and lower-alcohol beer portfolio to represent 20% of its global beer volume by 2025.

Internationally, research has shown that Generation Y consumers are becoming highly concerned about their health. In the UK, current trends indicate that 25 to 34 year-olds and 16 to 24 year-olds have the highest per capita consumption rates for low and non-alcoholic beer, according to Joe Hutson, consumer analyst at GlobalData.

“While the multiple light beer brands available in South Africa may point to light beer being accepted in South Africa, it is not clear what motivates the consumers in South Africa to purchase light beer. It is possible that regular and light beer drinkers share the same motives for purchasing their choice of beer, but this beer choice comparison has yet to be made in a South African context," said Pentz.

As such, Pentz's exploratory study sought to investigate the importance of 13 attributes that potentially motivate Gen Y consumers to purchase regular and light beer, as well as possible differences of attribute importance between the two beer choices. These attributes included taste, type of beer, price, brand name, alcohol content and calorie content.

The results showed that the most important attributes in both the regular and light beer categories were ranked in the following order: 1) taste; 2) type of beer; and 3) price. The least important attributes among regular beer drinkers were 1) visual design of the beer pack; 2) colour of the beer; and 3) calorie content. The least important attributes among light beer drinkers were 1) type of pack; 2) volume of the pack; and 3) colour of the beer.

Pentz said the study differs from previous studies (Chen, 2013; Chrysochou, 2014; Silva et al., 2016) regarding light-beer and light-food products, as calorie content was not found to be an important attribute motivating the purchase of light beer.  

“However, the importance assigned to taste suggests the success of a beer brand ultimately comes down to a functional value of consumption. For a light beer, the beverage must taste equally as good as its regular counterpart to achieve market share."

Yet despite the importance of taste, few South African light beer brands make direct reference to it in their marketing communications.

“Local South African beer brands could use the findings to place greater emphasis on relaying the aspect of taste and maybe less emphasis on attributes related to packaging and calorie and alcohol content," said Pentz.

In the future, Pentz aims to increase the size and representivity of the study sample to produce more in-depth qualitative studies.