Nightcap? Make It a Lyft Beer for Discounted Ride Home
The ride-hailing company is banking on Chicago’s drinking crowd.
Image: Lyft/Baderbrau
It’s the perfect form of marketing. Imagine: a young person is out for a night on the town. They’re a bit tipsy and beginning to wonder how they’ll get home. They look down at their beer and WHAM! There it is. Young person is taking a car home.
This is the master plan behind Lyft’s latest co-venture with Chicago-based Baderbräu Brewing Company. Together, the duo has brewed up a branded beer that has a ride discount built in to the packaging.
The “Five Star Lager” is not really a brand-new beer; it’s just a specialty can used to package Baderbräu’s “South Side Pride”—a lager that the company describes as a “beer-flavored beer.” It’s named after the company’s rating system, where passengers assess the quality of their ride using a five-star scale.The Five Star Lager will be available in 12-ounce cans for a limited time in Chicago only, and it will only be available to purchase in bars, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Discounts from the beer cans will be valid for up to a week, and will give the drinker a 40 to 60 percent discount on regular Lyft rides, with a maximum discount of $5. Sorry carpoolers.
“We know through data that nightlife is one of our largest business segments, especially going out on a Friday or Saturday night,” explained Lyft’s Midwest GM David Katcher to the Tribune. “Harder (to understand) is the psychology of how they decide to get home and when they decide to make that happen.”
Lyft is obviously attempting to pull off a brute-force psychological hack by putting the suggestion right in the weekend warrior’s hand. The partnership will, for the time being, last for as long as it takes the chum of Chi-Town to chug down 1,000 cases of Five Star Lager. And it seems as though it’s going to go quick; Baderbrau co-founder Rob Sama believes that it will be the perfect introduction to craft beer for many indiscriminate drinkers.
“For the guy drinking a Miller Lite or PBR the shift isn’t that dramatic,” he says.
If it goes down as easy as those beers, looks like the chuggers might be racking up quite a few discount codes. Care to share?
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