In this article:
- Bars and those who work in them incurred major losses from pandemic lockdowns
- Miller Lite’s line of scented candles let those who miss bars smell them at home while supporting a cause
Alcohol sales have risen during the pandemic, but people have been drinking at home as many bars were ordered shut by lockdown restrictions. For the patrons who miss going to the equivalent of wherever everyone knows their name and want to support the workers, Miller’s Lite is offering limited-edition scented candles for $20 a pop online.
Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: Monitoring the User’s Heartbeat
What Does It Mean to Treat a Customer’s Email With Respect?
To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)
What the Efforts to Promote Responsible Gaming Look Like Form the Inside
As Carol Krienik, associate marketing manager for Miller Lite, explains in the brand’s blog, the idea is to let customers enjoy the “Miller Time feeling at home” when social gatherings are still curtailed at bars. As bar favorites vary, there are three choices:
- Dive Bar mixes scents of musk, tobacco, pine, and yeast to conjure “dim lights, a faint glass clinking and the sinus-clearing sensation of a puddle that somehow exists indoors.”
- Beer Garden features green moss, warm pretzel, cracked wood and sunburn to “evoke a day spent outdoors as the scent of tropical sunscreens mixes with the staple garden eats that fill the air.”
- Game Day’s scents are salted peanut, jalapeno and cracked leather, mixing “top notes of the most ordered bar snacks on game day with the subtle power of comfortable cracked leather, the ideal backdrop to a freshly opened beer.”
Beer brands are not the only ones thinking that customers may want to smell what they’ve been missing. Yankee candles just introduced “Discovery” as its third-annual “Scent of the Year.” The fragrance summons up the scents associated with travel to tropical locations that the pandemic has curtailed.
The Yankee candle, however, is solely about giving customers a whiff of what they miss. In contrast, the Miller Lite line has a philanthropic side, as well.
All proceeds from the candle sales are to go to nonprofit organizations to support those who work in the field that have suffered such devastating losses over the last year. The blog refers to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report of over a million jobs lost in the sector. The unemployment rate had been only 5% in December 2019 and shot up to 16.7% a year later.