Beverages: For the Ladies

Two of the oldest advertising campaigns in the $14 billion liquor industry have lately taken a new direction. For 32 years, Hiram Walker & Sons’ Canadian Club “adventure series” has shown men trying far-out sports in faraway places, giving up finally to enjoy their favorite highball. Last month for the first time, the adventure included a woman mountain climber, who paused halfway up a rock face to ask: “Do I really have to do this sort of thing to earn my Canadian Club?” Meanwhile, Seagram Distillers Co., whose moderation ads since 1933 have cautioned fathers and counseled sons on drinking, switched pictures to a teenage daughter. “But, Daddy,” she pleaded, “if I don’t drink, they’ll think I’m from nowhere.” To which Seagram answered: “Drinking is a pleasure reserved for adults. She can wait.”

Their Pleasure. The two ads are effects of the same trend: the pleasure reserved for adults is more and more a woman’s pleasure as well as a man’s. Of some 65 million U.S. women over 18, probably six out of ten, by the inexact statistics of the liquor industry, drink at least occasionally. That represents a one-third increase in women drinkers in only ten years. Moreover, women now make about 45% of all liquor purchases, usually for the family. To win over to particular brands this rising number of sippers and shoppers, the industry is doing everything from putting out primers on cordials (National Distillers Products Co.) to promoting fashion shows in which the clothes carry I. W. Harper Kentucky Bourbon labels (Schenley Industries Inc.). Currently, $25 million worth of holiday wrapping is being tucked around package goods to give it a glossy, eye-catching sheen for the Christmas trade, which accounts for 15% of all sales. The color combinations of blue, green and lavender and the expensive embossed paper and fabric wrappings are mainly meant to attract feminine eyes.

Until 1958, under the code of the Distilled Spirits Institute, the industry trade organization, women models could not appear in liquor advertising. When the code was eased, Heublein, Inc., pioneered with a bottled-martini ad that included two cocktails on a table, a smiling young matron, and the phrase: “A wife’s warmest welcome is well chilled.” At first, like the Heublein lady, women could not be shown touching a glass or a bottle. Canadian Club’s new approach indicates that women can share both the adventure and the whisky. The most recent Seagram gin ad shows a married couple holding martinis and bragging about “our secret” for making them well. Distillers try to keep the women wifely instead of sex-kittenish. “The girl,” says Seagram Distillers Co. President Bernard Tabbat, “has to be a nice girl.” Adds National Distillers Vice President-General Manager Raymond Herrmann: “We don’t shock with low-cut gowns, but we don’t use nuns either.” In rather startling exception to this cautious approach, Cluny Scotch shows an obviously thirsting elderly woman pouring her Cluny into a teacup.

Like Any Other Shop. Distillers credit women with increased sales of vodka, rum, aperitifs, bottled cocktails and cocktail mixes. Even the trend to lighter Scotches is due partly to surveys showing that women think pale Scotch has a “nice” color. “Women walk into a liquor store today like any other shop,” says Seagram’s Tabbat, but they want the stores neat and convenient, and package-goods stores have spruced up as a result. Some distillers think drinking women have even increased male moderation. A man who might tipple too much alone or with other men tends to drink sensibly, they say, when a woman drinks with him.