Carlsberg has heralded the impact of a major restage and recipe revamp for helping turn around the fortunes of its flagship Danish Pilsner in the UK.
The ‘Probably Not The Best Beer in The World’ campaign – rolled out in 2019 after Carlsberg sales slid 11.5% to £183.9m in the year to April 2018 [NIQ] – had made shoppers re-evaluate their perception of the brand, global brand director Lynsey Woods said.
Prior to launching the campaign, “when people drank the beer blind, they really loved it”, she said. “But when you then told them it was Carlsberg their perception fell back. It is a mainstream lager in the UK, so they assumed that the quality wasn’t there. It was something we needed to fix.”
Alongside the £20m push, Carlsberg also overhauled the recipe of Danish Pilsner, promising consumers a “smoother, fuller mouth-feel and a perfect balance of bitterness and sweetness”.
“We didn’t actually need to change the recipe but we felt we were never going to win with UK consumers unless we said that something had significantly changed within the brew,” Woods said. “So when we launched the campaign we rebrewed it, keeping all the things that consumers loved and build on them with some elements that weren’t quite there.”
The effects of this extensive brand rebuilding exercise were now being seen in Carlsberg’s off-trade sales, Wood said. Value sales have grown by mid-single digits in both of the past two years and now stand at £224.1m [NIQ 52 w/e 19 April 2025].
Carlsberg has also seen an uplift in its brand health in the UK since 2018 as per metrics monitored by Ipsos.
Carlsberg tweaked the recipe of Danish Pilsner further in the UK in 2023 when it reduced the brew’s abv from 3.8% to 3.4% to take advantage of duty savings on lower-strength beers.
Woods declined to speculate if keener pricing – pre-promotional prices of Danish Pilsner four-packs fell by 1.9% across the big four and Waitrose in the year to February [Assosia] – had also contributed to the beer’s revival in the UK.
“Prices are set by retailers,” she said, adding there had been “no negative feedback at all” to the abv change from customers.
“Of course no big brand in the world makes moves like that without testing,” she said. “There’s always risk of course, but Carlsberg is growing in the UK doing phenomenally well. I would have killed for the brand health that the [UK] team have today.”
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