The assumption is that when teenagers want to drink, they buy the cheapest beer or booze or just suck down whatever they can steal from their parent’s liquor cabinets. But a new study finds that when it comes to liquors, there’s a racial divide—brands like Hennessy Cognac and Ciroc Vodka are preferred by black youth.
In fact, twelve alcohol brands among the top 25 preferred brands for black drinkers don’t appear at all on the top 25 for young white drinkers.
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“The one thing that we were able to find that tied all those brands together is that they were all heavily promoted in urban music culture.” The study’s lead researcher, Michael Siegel of Boston University’s Graduate School of Public Health.
“There are specific songs about those brands, there are artists, in some cases, actually are spokespeople for the brand, there are artists that are paid by alcohol companies with very large marketing deals.” The findings are in the Journal of Substance Abuse. [Michael Siegel et al, Differences in alcohol brand consumption among underage youth by age, gender, and race/ethnicity – United States, 2012]
“The message of much of these lyrics is through alcohol and specifically through these particular brands you can actually obtain a slice of prestige and a slice of upper social class, maybe not in real life but it makes you feel like you’re obtaining that through the use of these particular brands of alcohol.”
Siegel’s research also compiled examples of alcohol brand promotion: Nas is featured in Hennessy campaigns, Rick Ross is a spokesman for 1800 Tequila and Diddy has a hundred-million-dollar marketing deal with Ciroc. And even when artists are not directly endorsing liquors, branded lyrics are working their ways into their songs, and into teenager’s ears.
So parents, keep the lock on the liquor cabinets—and keep an ear on what your teenagers are listening to.
—Erika Beras
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
