Question

The Freshest Beer Program at Boston Beer Company

1. Outline the company’s generic business strategy. Remember that there are three tasks here:
   1. Identify the generic business strategy (Broad Low Cost, Broad Differentiation, Focused Low Cost, or Focused Differentiation?)
   2. Explain how they achieve their broad or narrow scope (remember that scope is determined by customers, products and geography). Please talk specifics.
   3. Explain how they achieve their low cost OR differentiation competitive advantage. Please be specific. Please talk about only one or the other and not both. If they are a differentiator, then only talk about how they differentiate themselves.

Answer 1

Boston Beer Company has a broad differentiation strategy . They have differentiated themselves as the provider of wide variety of high quality beer withunique flavors. To implement the strategy, it has a market driven approach where they continuously research on evolving consumer preferences. They have an R&D center set-up for that. To retain freshness of beer, they have reduced the stockpiling at wholesalers. They produce only as per orders. They have been able to do so by reducing cost of production and distribution. They are the largest among craft beer producers and hence have achieved economy of scale.