Week 9: Pricing and Distribution
Reading: * Marketing Management Chapters 14, 15 and 16 * Case: Mountain Man Brewing Company
Questions:
1. What has made the Mountain Man Brewing Company successful? What is distinctive about MMBC’s product, customers and brand equity?
Product
Mountain Man had high quality product. Those attributes included the smoothness, percentage of water content, and drinkability. The beer it produced was flavorful and bitter-tasting. Mountain Man had a well-known reputation as quality bee throughout the East Central region.
Customer
Mountain Man targeted clearly on the blue-collar, middle-to-lower income men whose age were over 45. These core drinkers had high loyalty to Mountain Man. Loyal
…show more content…
Therefore, it really needed a strong product that responded the market’s needs and wants so that the product could speak itself in order to survive the keen competition.
3. What has caused MMBC’s decline in spite of its strong brand?
a) The consumers’ tastes were changing. According to the case, the beer consumption had declined by 2.3% due to the competition from wine and spirits-based drinks. What’s more, an increase in federal tax as well as health concerns also caused the decline of the sales of beer.
b) Large national brands that maintained economies of scale in brewing, transportation and marketing put tremendous pressure on the smaller, regional brewers like Mountain Man.
C) The key consumer segment is the younger drinker who aged 21 to 27. They were first time drinker that not founded loyalty to any brand yet accounted for large beer consumption. The segment tended to purchase more light beer instead of lager.
D) Younger customers preferred to buy mainstream brands rather than regional ones.
E) More and more competitors such as import and craft beers.
4. Is Mountain Man Light financially feasible for MMBC? What is required for it to break even in two years? What market share would it need? Is the budget appropriate?
In order to have a new lager line, Mountain Man needed lots of thing and financial support. Although
While in England Molson bought brewery equipment. Molson induced he growth of barely in and around Quebec, by selling the farmers the seeds and agreeing to purchase the barley after it had ben harvested. Molson dedicated 20 yeas of his life to his business. Molson was smart, he stayed away from the import export business, it took much to long to get a return on your investment for Molsons liking, if you received a return at all because of the high risk business. In addition to seeing the danger in the import export business, Molson could tell that the money in the fur fade was coming to an end. Therefore staying away from it. As Molson predicted the fur trade ended, and in the early 19th century it switched to the lumber business. With time comes new technology, and this was a field that Molson was highly interested in and would later invest large amounts of money into. After receiving 10,000£ and his old family home, Snake Hall, Molson sold the home as it was back in England. All the money Molson had received went back into enlarging his facilities and reinvesting in his brewing establishment. With an influx of loyalist immigration from both England and the soon to be United States of America, the demand for beer increased, even the French, who had never taken a liking to Molsons product were showing an increased interest in it. Molsons money was always on the for front of technology. With steam being the new energy source of the time, Molson was very interested. Molson invested money in the testing of new
Mountain Man Brewing (MMB) has been successful with only one beer, Mountain Man Lager, but consumption has decreased. The decrease in sales for this beer has caused a decrease in profits, since it is their only product. Mountain Man needs to consider a change in their positioning strategy to increase sales and profits to keep the business successful.
Today, there are 31 microbreweries operating in Georgia, and 24 more in planning, bringing the total to 55 of these small-production breweries. What could have changed to cause an historically failed industry to boom in such a short period of time?
Although the launch of a new product is always going to be a risk, banking on the withering demand for a single offering is surely not going to alter the fortunes of the Mountain Man Beer Company. More importantly, light beer is the largest sales opportunity and it is what the market demands, therefore, to introduce the Mountain Man Light can be a gateway necessary for MMB to attract new customers and expand its market. Here are a series of recommendations offering to the company in order to help it successfully launch the Light beer.
Mountain crest beer- jumping the gun with 400 000 cans of beer assuming that the Ontario Government was just going to say Yes with persistence was very naive. Mountain crest beer should have started the process of filing the proper paper work well before the beer was produced. Had they done this they would have realized the red tape that is involved with trying to move into the Ontario liquor market considering the two huge top beer companies already make up the fair share of this market. Essentially
Coors has been very popular since the 1900’s, with 1970’s being its most successful year. Coors is also known for spending more for better quality beer and most of the success from this company was because of their brewing process (HBS). Which then was taken over by his son and he had continued the success with selling 90,000 barrels of beer and continued to accelerate which eventually spiked up to selling to 7.3 billion barrels in 1970 (HBS). The success for Coors didn’t last long, as for most beer industries, they started to lose stock and had dropped to 21 USD. After Coors, had placed a very uncalled for advertising post in the Washington post, the volume for them had decreased to 4% which was only 11.9 million barrels (HBS). After this
Marketing is one of the key issues that any microbrewery faces. ThePortableBarCompany states that “most microbreweries struggle to succeed because they lack marketing expertise, even if it brews a delicious beer.” Terre Haute Brewing Company plans to attack this problem by the use of the internet. They are revamping their entire website, creating social media pages, and have a mobile app in the process of being made. This opens up their advertisement to a completely new market as technology advances. Keeping emotions separate from business decisions is another issue they’re facing. Since all employees have strong emotional ties to the company, they find it difficult making objective decisions. This is strategically relevant because it could
This paper concedes John’s Labatt’s accomplishments as a skilled engineer in his trade of brewing. “[Having] a sense his water would suit the production” of the India pale ale formula he brought back with him from West Virginia was an intuitive geographical exploitation of his resources. This examination would also like to acknowledge the tactfulness and innovation displayed by John Labatt’s ability to brand and market. For example, his strategic use of a Labatt logo that “resembled Bass’s red triangle” was an ingenious way of stimulating British colonizers to free associate with a recognizable beer brand from back home. On the other hand, Labatt on more than one occasion failed to make adequate decisions that inevitably
Big or small, companies in the beer market are competing for the same resources and are affected by the prices’ fluctuations of their inputs. In the beer market, some of the key inputs to consider in any economic analysis are grains, hops and yeast.
* It was originally successful in the test markets and was expected to be a popular beer with the rise in lager popularity.
The world beer industry is still fragmented with the four major companies only accounting for 22% of the worldwide market. Hence it was expected that there are chances of consolidation. The aim of industry rationalisation is gathering economies of scale in production, advertising and distribution. But the cost structure –high ratio of fixed versus variable costs – and different local tastes dampened the consolidation process in the brewery industry. Rationalisation through shifting to modern production facilities requires high investments, often in unstable economies. That is why capital expenditures in these markets should spread over a longer periods to ensure profitability also in early stages. Local brands are often established for centuries and an integral
With the direction of its strong leadership and strategic vision, Asahi’s management and workers were willing to follow and implement change by going against conventional wisdom and positioning the company in 1987 with an overall market share of 12% and projected increase of 23% through 1990. Included in this projection, was the latest Asahi product development, “Super Dry” beer, which at first, Higuchi was reluctant to introduce into the market so soon after the release of Asahi Draft, but after tasting the product himself he decided to market the product resulting in a 33% sales increase in 1987. Higuchi now proposes an investment plan to increase brewing and packaging capacity by 30% at a cost of 230 billion yen over two years, 1989 -1990.
These radical idea’s and techniques lead to some micro-breweries becoming quite large in the mid 90’s. Fueled by big spending and gains in the dot com bubble many saw the trend in beer and cashed in. With a 50% growth from 1994-95, similarly by 1996 37% of beer drinkers had tried a micro-brew (Robison, John). Many companies such as sam adam where having IPO’s, where stocks are publicly available to trade. Sam adams opened on the first day at 18 dollars for a share and by the end of the first day it was up to 25 dollars. Red Hook also opened at 18 and was up to 27 and for a couple years didn't trade below 24. Many jumped on fueled by a gold rush. What’s more in 1994 64 new breweries opened, and by the 2nd quarter of 1995 59 had already opened (Gunn, Eileen).
It can be said that all four factors; politics, economical, social and legal are all intertwined as one factor affects another. In relation to politics the rules and regulations set by the government ultimately affects the economic side of the beer industry. Due to the lack of growth and profit there are closures, which means socially there are loss of jobs. Furthermore, from a legal aspect
Since 1951 to the mid-1970s, Coors enjoyed seamless year-to-year growth in sales reaching 12.3 million barrels in 1974. However, in 1975, sales unexpectedly dropped by 4% and after that despite considerable growth of the trade area, the increase in sales was accounted only for 2.7 million of barrels. Coors competitive position deteriorated because of a combination of increasing competitive environment in the brewing industry and errors of judgment of Coors’s management: deficit of product related to the low capacity of production, long technological cycle of making beer and massive strikes of workers, as well as problems with distribution connected