Nigerian Breweries leads as marketing spend in brewery sector hit 3 year high of 60billion
About sixty billion naira was spent on marketing and promotional activities among the top three brewers in Nigeria in 2018 and this represented the highest that the sector has spent since 2016.
Nigerian Breweries which controls more than 50 percent of the industry’s market share led the chart with close to 24billion devoted to its various marketing undertaking. This was more than a billion naira more than it spent in 2017 and 2016 where its marketing budget stood at N22.4b and N22.3b respectively.
Surprisingly, the next biggest spender is no longer Guinness Nigeria which for years has been on the tail of NB Plc in terms of marketing expenditure as both companies’ grapples for market leadership. That spot now belongs to International Breweries which has been acquired by SABMiller (which was later bought over by ABinBEV, the world’s largest brewery company by revenue) and spent over N20billion on marketing in 2018.
As at 2016 just before the acquisition deal was consummated International Brewery was a fringe player in the sector and its was reflected in its marketing spend which was a mere N3.5billion compared to Guinness Nigeria which was more than N8billion and that of Nigerian Breweries stood at a whopping N22.3billion.
But as soon as ABinBev completed the acquisition of IB Plc, the company underlined its ambition in Nigeria with a rapid increase in its marketing and advertising budget which rose to over N6billion in 2017 and that figure was more than tripled as it galloped to about N21billion in 2018 against Guinness Nigeria’s N12billion for same period.
A lot of AbInBev’s marketing spend have gone into the execution of its regional marketing strategies, which the company pioneered in Nigeria. This strategy led to the launch of Hero larger beer as well as Trophy larger bother of which has become market leaders in their various regional markets.
According to Ganiyu Olowu, a brand analyst, AbInBev didn’t just pour money into advertising they were very strategic. “The manner in which SABMiller sneaked up on Nigeria’s biggest brewers is no cheerful news to the AB InBev’s competitors in the beer market.
“Rather than go with the usual fanfare that follows the launch of a new product, the brand capitalised on the heroic status of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the East and launched the product during his burial. It was not actually a ‘launch’; it was more like a massive release during the burial of the Biafran War hero. From then on, it found love with the people and it had to take the release of Life Lager by Nigerian Breweries to curb the harm it was doing to other brands in the market.”
In order to consolidate on success of its regional product, AbInBev soon introduced a number of its top global brands into the Nigerian markets to rival competitors.
The company introduced brands like Castle Lite into the market which NB Plc has tried to match with the introduction of Star Lite, and soon after it introduced Budweiser and NB plc followed up with the launch of Tiger beer.
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