Hofmeister is back. But not in a form recognisable to anyone old enough to remember the lager brand’s laddish 1980s TV commercials, in which a pork pie hat-wearing mascot urged drinkers to “follow the bear”.
Only the name and bear logo remain, as Hofmeister swaps draft and cans for bottles and relaunches aiming to compete in the “premium” lager market against rival brands such as Peroni, Budvar and Estrella.
Richard Longhurst and Spencer Chambers, the drinks industry veterans behind the Hofmeister revival, are hoping to ride on the coat tails of nostalgia for the brand, a tactic that has worked well for other products.
Wines such as Lambrusco and Black Tower are among old favourites to have staged nostalgia-fuelled comebacks, while the likes of Babycham and Advocaat have also enjoyed the occasional cameo.
Longhurst and Chambers’ aim is to exploit a gap in the market for a Bavarian beer, pitched somewhere in between micro-brewery “craft” beers and mass-market megabrews.
“Everyone knows Bavaria makes some of the best beer in the world, yet no one can name a Bavarian brand,” says Chambers, pointing out that the likes of Erdinger and Warsteiner are relatively small players in the UK.
Despite mascot George the bear’s claim to Bavarian heritage, the original 1980s Hofmeister never had the slightest association with Germany’s beer-loving Bundesland.
It was brewed in the UK and even in a decade in which weak, flavourless lagers successfully promoted with catchy marketing campaigns were the norm, quickly became a byword for bad beer.
“For great lager, follow the bear,” ran the slogan, part of an advertising campaign that reportedly proved to be cinema legend Orson Welles’ last project as a director.
The brand was retired in 2003 and there will be no nationwide TV campaign for its revival. Longhurst and Chambers are planning a more low key promotional strategy, making the beer available in regional pubs first while they gauge how well it is doing.
“We don’t want to flood the market,” said Longhurst. “It’s not the beer or the brand that it was.”
Familiarity with the Hofmeister name, said Chambers, has already helped secure private funding from investors in the City of London.
But marketing and PR expert Mark Borkowski – instrumental in the social media campaign that persuaded Cadbury’s to bring back Wispa – thinks Hofmeister’s “Eurofizz” reputation means they have a tough job ahead.
“I can see the tactic. Here’s a dead name that had its advertising peak in the mid to late 80s. There’ll be nostalgia around that so stick it on a great beer and away you go,” Borkowski said.
“People get excited by a heritage brand and it could give them traction and make people interested in it but one wonders whether it’ll carry with hipsters into craft beer.
“I think they should just be a bit careful. It was a bit of a joke brand and the bottom line here is that it’s got to be good, because it wasn’t good.”
The increasingly mainstream “craft beer revolution” has put the emphasis on quality and authenticity. Accordingly, Longhurst and Chambers toured Bavaria in search of the best Helles lager they could find.
They hit upon award-winning fourth-generation brewery Schweiger, on the edge of the Ebersberger forest, which uses local Hallertau hops, natural spring water and barley from nearby farmers.
The new Hofmeister is brewed according to the German “Reinheitsgebot” law governing the ingredients of beer. The result is a pleasant, easy-drinking but relatively complex Helles lager with a long aftertaste, a world away from the original.
With a brewer on board, the firm hired former Coca-Cola marketing director Zoe Howorth for the tricky task of relaunching George the bear as a mark of quality.
Howorth said the Hofmeister bear’s lads-on-tour, banter-based approach “wouldn’t be appropriate” for today’s market and he needed “reskinning”. However, she added that “Follow the bear” still provided a “fantastic call to action”.
