Mixing Your Drinks: Alcohol and Exercise

A YouGov survey, on behalf of the Know Your Limits campaign shows that 19 per cent of adults in England who exercise regularly and drink alcohol admit to taking exercise or playing sport in order to “make up” for having drunk a lot of alcohol in the previous few days. The story has been covered here and here.

The tendency to ‘work out the alcohol’ is even more prevalent among heavy drinkers: the survey shows one in five English adults are drinking more than double the NHS recommended limits and, of those who also exercise, over a quarter (28%) admit doing so to make up for their drinking.

This compares to just 10 per cent of people who exercise and drink at ‘lower risk’ – those who do not regularly drink more than 3-4 units a day for men, and 2-3 units a day for women.

Renault Race Fixing

We’ve discussed before the stability of brands: British Airways is a great example of those that have suffered all sorts of media squalls and yet always return to their same high BrandIndex score. They are in the overwhelming majority: it’s one of the key reasons to invest heavily in brand-building, that it provides a cushion of goodwill for the time when something bad happens. Some don’t bounce back: a little while ago we looked at how most of the banking brands had almost fully recovered, but not Rbs or NatWest. So what has been the immediate effect of two recent scandals, the alleged price-fixing by a number of sports companies, and race-fixing by Renault F1?

One can hardly imagine that the Renault image can remain untouched: it’s true of course that the bad behavior of a sports team, and the qualities of a family car, are hardly linked. But then again Renault sponsors its team precisely to build its brand, to give it a sexier edge, and so one might think that cheating and endangering human life would have a negative effect. But the first graph shows that while buzz took a small hit – people did notice the news – the car brand wasn’t hurt at all.

So what about JJB? Price-fixing allegations surely go to the heart of the brand – after all, that could be seen as a direct attack on the very essence of the customer relationship. But Graph 2 shows that again, while the story was noticed, evidenced by a nine point dip in ‘buzz’, the index score, representing broader brand qualities, hardly moved. This looks like good news for marketeers: it takes a lot to do long-term harm.