And then, the following week, PMA carried another article with the headline, ‘Cask seen again as saviour for pubs’. In a survey of 300 licensees, 73% said they expected cask sales to increase in the coming year, compared to just 5% who expect them to fall.
Don’t get me wrong — this is great news. To anyone working on the research, or receiving the press release about it, this simply has to be the headline.
It’s just that, having seen this headline so many times now, a reader could be forgiven for skipping the rest of the findings, believing they’re just going to be reading the same old thing. And that would be a shame, because there’s much more in the research than yet another conformation of cask’s ascendancy.
I was asked to give a comment for the press release, and so was sent a full copy of the research results. They make interesting and, for me, optimistic reading on a number of points.
In its news story, the PMA cited as a cause for concern the finding that 35% of licensees see future prospects for the industry as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. Yes, that is a worrying number. But with 37% saying prospects are ‘neither good nor bad’ and 28% saying they’re ‘good or excellent’, that suggests to me that opinion in the industry is divided.
If you’d asked me to guess what the numbers would be, I would have anticipated that at least half of landlords would have a gloomy outlook.
Maybe it’s just me, but this is more positive than I expected.
Even more interesting are the results on the key threats and opportunities licensees perceive affecting their business.
A whopping 74% see social media as a big opportunity for their business moving forward. The idea that the internet is going to stop people going out to pubs is almost non-existent, with a mere 3% seeing the online world as a threat.
The runner-up in terms of opportunity is ‘more enticing food’, with ‘good quality staff’ trailing a distant third. The survey is of course anonymous, but here I wish it wasn’t, so I could find out who the 29% are who see good quality staff as a threat to their business, and avoid their pubs.
The biggest perceived threat was, of course, off-trade price competition. Local control over licensing, greater control of drinks promotions, and availability/cost of finance were also worries. But the second greatest concern, for 72% of respondents, is the growth of in-home entertainment. This tends not to get much discussion because it is not a structural industry issue we can really campaign against.
However, we ignore it at our peril, and this survey suggests we should be talking much more widely and openly about what else pubs can do to entice people out of their homes and offer an alternative to sitting in front of the X-Box.
The survey’s other key question was on perceived demand for products.
Respondents see big opportunities for wine by the glass, for bottled and draught cider, and bottled soft drinks. But the biggest loser is premium bottled lager, with only 21% anticipating an increase in demand, and 35% predicting a fall — a net score of minus 14%
Coupled with the expected growth of cask ale, this surely signals a sea change in the market. Premium draught lager just sneaks into expected growth with 4% — the smallest positive score — but standard draught lager, like bottled lager, is also expected to shrink.
Only an idiot would forecast this as the ‘death of lager’, but we are seeing an on-trade drinks market that is diversifying, with the homogeneity and dominance of mass-market lager being eroded from all sides.
Which brings me to the single most telling part of the whole survey — the fact that it was commissioned by MolsonCoors.
The brewing giant that owns Britain’s biggest standard lager brand, a company many erroneously believe is still ‘anti’ cask ale, is the company that’s out there proclaiming cask as the saviour of pubs.
The final proof, if any were needed, of the enormity of the change taking root in our drinking habits.