{"id":2842,"date":"2015-09-01T06:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T11:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=2842"},"modified":"2015-08-30T11:20:44","modified_gmt":"2015-08-30T16:20:44","slug":"business-has-only-two-functions-marketing-and-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=2842","title":{"rendered":"Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Warsteiner-Radleralkoholfrei-0-33-l-Alcohol-free-Beer-Limonade-Mix-11-15-fl-oz-_main-1\"<\/a>Early in the winter of 2007, Albert Cramer, the owner of Warsteiner Brewery, invited me to spend a weekend with him at his winter home in Florida.\u00a0 Albert had built an unusual house on the beach near Orlando some years earlier.\u00a0 The design of the house was similar to a castle with four turrets.\u00a0 The garage, which occupied the entire lower floor, boosted a German country side scene on the walls and a cobble stone floor.\u00a0 Every level had a clear view of the ocean.\u00a0 The bar, located in the upper middle floor had a view overlooking the ocean and was framed overhead by an old cooper kettle from the brewery.\u00a0 To say the house was unique is an understatement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Albert invited me to his home to show me some new products he wanted Warsteiner to import into the US market.\u00a0 I had suggested to him that he should brew a light beer, given that Heineken had recently rolled out their light with great success.<\/span><\/p>\n

Albert presented three new products, all Warsteiner mixes.\u00a0 These new products were 60% Warsteiner premium and 40% flavors: cola, orange and lemon\/lime.\u00a0 Because they were a mix, they were low in ABV, registering in around 2.9% each.<\/span><\/p>\n

Until this time, all flavored beers introduced into the market had failed.\u00a0 I brought this to Albert’s attention, including the fact that some of these failures had a sizable marketing budget supporting the product.\u00a0 Albert’s idea was to get ahead of future competition.\u00a0 He believed that in the coming years, flavors in beer would be\u00a0the new big thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suggested that we first test market these new products.\u00a0 He rejected that idea and wanted to roll out all three of these in all markets.\u00a0 My next suggestion was to do a sampler pack enabling us to pre-sell the pack to a big box store and find out the response from the consumers and retail market.\u00a0 This too, was rejected after Albert figured out that the brewery would have to manually put the bottles into the cases.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the winter meetings in Germany, a few months later, and the idea of the flavored new products were on the top of the agenda.\u00a0 Only this time now the brewery added a Radler along with Warsteiner Light.\u00a0 The Radler made sense along with the light beer.\u00a0 What Warsteiner ended up doing was to sample all the US major light beers and from those, the brewery created a liquid based on those flavor profiles.\u00a0 The light turned out to be a very good light beer.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the original plan, the brewery agreed to support the mixes with an initial marketing budget of $200K to be used in key markets.\u00a0 Once the beer was ordered and on the way, this support was changed to an incentive to be paid upon getting sales.\u00a0 Without the support, these products had no chance even though a number of distributors had done a great job of getting the beer out and to the consumer.\u00a0 Warsteiner ended up writing off most of the mixes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, in 2015, the industry is seeing such mixes and flavors enter the market with great success.\u00a0 Not Your Father\u2019s Root Beer and Coney Island, also a root beer, are the hot new flavors.\u00a0 Word on the street is that we will soon see a Wheaties Beer, Ginger Ale Beer, and just announced a Pop Tart flavored beer!\u00a0 Maybe we will soon see alcoholic products from coke.\u00a0 Instead of Coke Zero and Sprite Zero, how about Coke Plus and Sprite Plus?<\/span><\/p>\n

Ten years later, it is clear Albert Cramer was ahead of the industry with his mixes and flavors.\u00a0 If Warsteiner had supported the favored beers with marketing, Albert\u2019s products could have easily been the leader in this category.\u00a0\u00a0 Business has only two functions: marketing and innovation.<\/span><\/p>\n

BeerFodder\u00a0;<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.bizjournals.com\/<\/span>philadelphia\/news\/2015\/08\/18\/philadelphia-brewing-beer-holy-wooder-pope-francis.html<\/a><\/p>\n

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

Early in the winter of 2007, Albert Cramer, the owner of Warsteiner Brewery, invited me to spend a weekend with him at his winter home in Florida.\u00a0 Albert had built an unusual house on the beach near Orlando some years earlier.\u00a0 The design of the house was similar to a castle with four turrets.\u00a0 The […]<\/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-JQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842"}],"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=2842"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2855,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions\/2855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}