The Relationship Between Alcohol Price and Brand Choice Among Underage Drinkers: Are the Most Popular Alcoholic Brands Consumed by Youth the Cheapest?

Abstract

We examined the influence of price on alcohol brand choice among underage youth. Using a national sample of 1,032 youth, ages 13–20, recruited from a national Internet panel in 2011–2012, we compared differences in mean prices between popular and unpopular brands, examined the association of price and brand popularity using logistic regression, and rank ordered the average price of top brands. Lower brand-specific prices were significantly associated with higher levels of past 30-day consumption prevalence. However, youth did not preferentially consume the cheapest brands. These findings indicate that youth have preferences for certain brands, even if those brands cost more than competing brands. Our study highlights the need for research on the impact of brand-specific alcohol marketing on underage drinking.

Keywords :

• alcohol
• alcohol brands
• price
• underage drinking
• surveillance
• youth

THE AUTHORS

Alison Burke Albers, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health. Previously, her work focused on tobacco control, and she has recently shifted to applying research methods from this area to alcohol control. She is a co-investigator for a NIAAA-funded study of alcohol brand use among underage youth.

William DeJong, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), where he teaches courses in intervention planning, health communications, and program evaluation. Dr. DeJong is the author of nearly 400 professional publications in the fields of alcohol and tobacco control, criminal justice, health communications, health promotion, and social psychology. Many of these publications focus on issues related to alcohol and other drug problems among U.S. college students.

Timothy Naimi is a clinician–investigator with the Section of General Internal Medicine at Boston Medical Center and an associate professor at the Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. His areas of research include binge drinking, youth drinking, and alcohol control policies.

THE AUTHORS

Dr. Michael Siegel is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health. He has been a researcher in the tobacco control area for the past 25 years. Recently, he began conducting alcohol research, transferring many of the research methods he developed in the tobacco field over to alcohol. He is co-Principal Investigator for an NIAAA-funded study of alcohol brand use among underage youth.

David H. Jernigan, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society and the Director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he teaches courses on media advocacy and alcohol policy. He also leads two other research projects: a collaboration with Boston University School of Public Health looking at youth alcohol brand preference and brand-level exposure to alcohol marketing, and a four-university collaborative examining the social and health effects of changes in alcohol pricing. He has worked as an advisor to the World Health Organization and the World Bank, was principal author of WHO's first Global Status Report on Alcohol and Global Status Report on Alcohol and Youth, and co-authored Media Advocacy and Public Health: Power for Prevention, and Alcohol in the Developing World: A Public Health Perspective.

GLOSSARY

• Internet panel: An internet panel is a sample of individuals who agree to participate in online survey research. The panel may be recruited by probability or nonprobability sampling methods.

• Popular & Unpopular Alcoholic Beverage Brands. A brand's volume-based market share is the percentage of all standard drinks consumed during the past 30 days by all respondents combined that was attributable to that brand. “Popular brands” were categorized as those with a market share ≥ 0.87% and “unpopular brands” as those with a market share of < 0.87%.

• Prevalence of Past 30-day Consumption. The prevalence of past 30-day consumption of each alcohol brand is the proportion of respondents who reported having consumed the brand in the past 30 days.