Post-Truth Marketing (and a Really Tasty Beer)

Date: 2025-04-27

Last Updated: 2025-04-27

I want to talk about advertising for a second. Why does it exist? If you are in a intro to business class you might say:

"Advertising exists to educate the consumer about the options on the market so they can make an educated decision"

a classical economist might go further and say:

"Adding information to the market enables more effective price discovery (i.e. the process by which buyers and sellers establish a fair market price), bringing costs down.”

I think intuitively we all know this is not true. I turn off my adblocker, and I do not feel more informed about the market. Nor do I when I see a billboard walking down the street. However, I want to take a case study into my personal decision making to show how these statements are not only incorrect, but in fact the truth is quite often the exact opposite.

In practicality, we live in a "Post Truth Society", and the contemporary marketing industry is at the forefront of this nihilist ideology.

Part 1: A really Tasty Beer

I was at the bottleshop recently, and picked up some beers by a brewery I hadn't heard of before. I got a 6-pack of the Zytho Brewing Oaked Cherry Sour

And it was tasty! I pride myself on being knowledgeable about beer, so I can say it checked all the boxes for a beer of this style. It balanced the sweetness of the cherry against the malt perfectly, the lactic acid from the souring complemented the tart malic acid of the cherry well. It was clearly a kettle sour, but it emulated the "feeling" of a Belgian Kirsch Lambic really well, and at a really good price for something available in Australia.

I was impressed. So like I often do when I am impressed by a beer, I inspected the side of the can while I drank. Just to see what I can learn about this beery and the brewery I hadn't heard of before.

And that when I saw it. With great pains I had been duped. Pinnacle Drinks.

This wasn't some up and coming brewery with a great new recipe and process. I was drinking Woolworths Homebrand with some snazzy branding on it. (For our international readers, Woolworths is one of the largest Supermarket / Food & Bev companies in Australia, constantly being critizied for its place in the "Colesworth" Duopoly )

I felt betrayed.

Part 2: Why Did it hurt

When I realised that I was drinking a contract brewed recipe, owned by one of the largest food & beverage companies in the country, I felt lied to. I entered this transaction thinking I was:

Supporting a small brewery
Paying extra for the smaller economies of scale
Indulging in my "Hipster Identity" (I am not too proud to admit that I enjoy being at the cutting edge of beer trends)

Instead, what I got was a beer that was the same as any other macro-brewery but with a different sticker. (A macro-brewery with a really good recipe however).

Why did I even want to support a small brewery?

This much is obvious, but I need to state it to make my next point more clear.

I am willing to pay more to support what I think of as a small brewery, because I want to support the small companies pushing forward the medium. In the same way we like to support small artists who push forward their artistic medium, I like to support small breweries willing ot experiment with new recipes.

I also like to support small companies, especially as we are seeing rampant corporate consolidation in the economy.

Part 3: So why did Woolworths do this to me?

Woolworths made this decision because they know I feel that way. Woolworths' Marketing department knows that a certain segment of the population are insufferable hipsters and nerds, who wont buy anything with their name on it. So they ~~lie~~ strategically manage brand identity to maximize market segmentation.

This is a very common practise in not only the food & bev industry, but in almost every consumer facing industry. Fun fact: Unilever owns both the "Self Love and Feminist" brand toiletry brand Dove, and the "This body spray will make women immediately fall in love with you as when they smell it" brand Axe Body spray (Lynx in Australia).

Piecing it together

Lets step back for a bit. In the first paragraph of this post we said that the reason marketing exists was "...to educate the consumer about the options on the market so they can make an educated decision".

Woolworth did the exact opposite of that with their Zytho Brand. They used deceptive (and legal, no libel here) branding to disinform me, and make me less educated than I would have been if they had just put their label on it.

There isn't any call to action here. I just wanted to rant about the time I got duped, and use it as an excuse to educate readers about the nihilist post-truth ideology of the marketing industry.