{"id":1877,"date":"2014-07-29T06:00:06","date_gmt":"2014-07-29T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1877"},"modified":"2014-07-29T10:57:09","modified_gmt":"2014-07-29T15:57:09","slug":"it-is-not-what-you-look-at-that-matters-it-is-what-you-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1877","title":{"rendered":"It is not what you look at that matters, it is what you see.."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cheers<\/a>Up until the early 1970s, categorizing beer was simple.\u00a0 At the top were imports, with the highest PTC. By far the leading brand was Heineken.\u00a0 As in most categories, the different imports were priced approximately the same.\u00a0 Slightly lower were super premiums, dominated by Michelob.\u00a0 In fact, in many markets, it was only Michelob in this segment.\u00a0 Then came the biggest category: national premiums.<\/p>\n

In this category were the “big” boys:\u00a0 Budweiser, Schlitz, Coors, and in many markets, Pabst, Falstaff, and Miller.\u00a0 Of the last three pricing could vary slightly.\u00a0 Trailing the end were the regionals lead by Old Milwaukee and Busch (where available), followed by local beers including Lone Star, Pearl, Jax, Hamm\u2019s, Rainer, Olympia, and Henry\u2019s, Schaefer, Narragansett, and many others.<\/p>\n

Each category had its own pricing structure.\u00a0 There was no variance within these pricing structures.\u00a0 It was simply based on price and one immediately knew where and what position the beer would be viewed by the consumer and retailer.<\/p>\n

When Miller Lite was introduced by Miller, it was priced slightly higher than the national premiums.\u00a0 Miller had created a whole new category and pricing structure.\u00a0 As the light volume grew along with new brands from AB and Coors, the breweries decided to line- price their lights with their regular beers.\u00a0 This made sense, however, by now pricing across categories began to blur.<\/p>\n

First, more imports began to land in the US and then breweries introduced “price beers” to run production at, or close to capacity.\u00a0 Regionals began to move their pricing closer to AB and Coors, which soon sealed their fate as the consumer began to shift more and more from regionals to nationals.<\/p>\n

Craft beers, starting with Boston Beer, began to rearrange the categories and the pricing structures within each segment.\u00a0 Breweries, which had in the past, priced beer based on their knowledge of the price point, began to apply their strategies around margin requirements of their wholesalers and national chains including Walmart.\u00a0 Instead of pricing from the “ground up”, it was now “top down” pricing based by market.\u00a0 Pricing analysts or business analysts were in high demand, and remain so today.<\/p>\n

Pricing categories began to have levels within the category.\u00a0 As an example, German imports within that segment began to have three levels of pricing:\u00a0 first, an upper end, followed by middle end, and finally the lower end.\u00a0 Again working pricing backwards, importers could position their beer to best fit their strategy.<\/p>\n

With the massive growth and influx of crafts, pricing ranges from around premium to some bottles approaching high end wine and spirits.\u00a0 To position any beer now is more along the price point base on marketing strategy than by category.<\/p>\n

The Brewers Association and its members, however, continue to want to define, or in this case redefine, the definition of craft brewer.\u00a0 Now based on annual volume, a craft brewer must be less than six million bbls.\u00a0 No one in the industry expects that beer segments or categories are going to merge into just one definition, but perhaps the consumer does not care what the beer might be.\u00a0 It is not what you look at that matters, it is what you see!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This weeks link:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/stlpubli<\/span>cradio.github.io\/beer-gif\/index.html<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Up until the early 1970s, categorizing beer was simple.\u00a0 At the top were imports, with the highest PTC. By far the leading brand was Heineken.\u00a0 As in most categories, the different imports were priced approximately the same.\u00a0 Slightly lower were super premiums, dominated by Michelob.\u00a0 In fact, in many markets, it was only Michelob in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2xRTi-uh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1877"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1982,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions\/1982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}