Creative Business Thinking
Key Activities: There are two key activities in the microbrewery business. These are making beer and selling beer. The two are distinct processes, and are only loosely related. The beermaking process is fairly simple, and there are only so many ways to reinvent that wheel. So the key success factor with that activity is to brew beer that has no technical flaws, but also that has a character that appeals to the modern beer drinker. This means building a portfolio with a mix more lighter, more approachable beers and more full-flavored beers that appeal to beer geeks, like the sour program highlighted in on the Kickstarter site.
The second key activity is marketing. Beer distribution is a challenging business. Laws differ from state to state but there is often a third party involved, the distributor. Even with a distributor, microbreweries need to find ways to generate publicity and goodwill for their brands, and they must often do so on a limited budget. This is where making great beer is actually quite important, because it helps to create a buzz in the beer geek community (early adopters) and is even better if the brewery can make a splash and get a good score on a site like Ratebeer.com. If you look at another project that has crowd-sourced early financing, J. Wakefield Brewing, test batches made at a nearby microbrewery were sold at a beer festival and the scores were overwhelmingly positive, and...
Inebriation is pretty easy to achieve -- convicts make alcohol by fermenting orange juice and ketchup into something called pruno. So that's the easy part. People drink your beer instead of the 1000 other brands out there because they like the taste. So that is the key value proposition, that the beer looks, smells and tastes great to the people in your target market.
Making your beer easy to find is another value proposition to offer. This is important in a country where the latest estimates show more than 2500 different breweries. Ratebeer lists over 200,000 unique beers and the number grows every day. So there's a lot of competition. Most consumers are not going to go that far out of the way to buy your beer when there are so many other perfectly good options. Thus, you must make it easy to find your beer. That is an important value proposition and it is why when a microbrewery gains some momentum, it starts to become available everywhere, and that only builds more momentum.
For the customer, cost is another value proposition. Even among microbrews, most products are subject to price competition, and consumers are increasingly price sensitive. A supremely high end beer might not have much price-sensitivity, but if you are…
