My Fun Friday Night

So a couple friends were going to stop by after they get off of work tonight, and after the week I've had, I want nothing more than to just call it off, and get to bed early...

Every day this week manged to be more work than the one before, and Friday was the very definition of the word STRESS.

It's not like it's really hard work, we just spent the majority of the day in a meeting with one of our smaller importers dealing with a bit of "brand management." This is a fancy way to say that we spent five hours talking about their beers and how they feel that we should be promoting them within our company.

Don't get me wrong, I think that our smaller brands are some of our strongest ones. Each one has it's place in the market, and they would not be in my company's portfolio if they weren't a solid brand that we were all proud to be behind. But not every brand is going to be the biggest one even within it's own part of the market, especially when they are going up against brands that are managed and owned by companies with bigger fiscal backing. Yet for the most part, they all have the lofty aspiration of "Owning the Category," fancy trade speak for saying that you're the best among the others that you realistically compete against.

However, the importer that we were meeting with today GETS IT.

Their entire presentation (I couldn't really call it anything else, and that makes it sound so odd, but it felt like listening to a sales pitch) was that they desire for us to establish them as our upscale choice. And all of their beers are in a category (and a price bracket) that makes that desire a realistic choice. So the entire thing was basically their long winded way of saying that they should be pitched not as the primary beer for any account, but as the up sell to the primary brands within our portfolio.

Some of their beers manage to be affordable enough that they could be an every day selection. They range in price from $2.49 to $2.99 a piece for a 16 oz single. Not a "bargain" beer by any standard, but affordable enough to make themselves the choice of enough buyers within this market to really do some serious volume.

Then there are the other beers that move up in the range. $5, $10, and even a few $15 beers.
Each.
Not for six, but for ONE.
These beers might have a shot at being Bill Gate's "go-to beers," but for the most part people are not going to spend $15 a beer unless they are at a sporting event. (Speaking of which, the beer tally from last nights game came to $256... Thank God for the expense account.)

So, in keeping with the French, they have instituted an in house campaign of "Drink Less, Drink Better." Which is only funny to me because another brewer managed to beat them to the punch of trademarking it and putting it on their website. But these guys have actually been using the phrase to describe their marketing strategy for a longer period of time...


So here comes the $12,000,000 question (the value of these brands to us)... Do you reach for beer based upon Quality and Experience, or Volume and Price?