Beer is one of the most common drinks today and it has a wide range of consumers in all age groups. This explains the fact that there are close to 40,000 brands of beer available in the market for people to choose from. This means beer manufacturers are fighting to dominate the market. Gone are the days when people were looking for cheap beer. Nowadays, people are ready to spend extra bucks if they are assured of high quality of beer. Amidst some of the top quality names in the market, one beer company has managed to stand tall among its peers and has a large number of satisfied customers. We are talking about Boston Beer (SAM, Financial), the company that manufactures Sam Adams light and regular beers. Of all the beer brands, why is Sam Adams the most-preferred? What is it that people love about this brand? Let us see some of the main reasons for the success of this brand in this article.
Diverse products to the rescue
When all beer companies are trying hard to gain customer respect, Boston Beer is probably the only company that has managed to come first in the customer satisfaction index in the light beer and regular beer categories. One of the main points that work in favour of Boston Beer is that it manufactures beer in many flavours. In the regular, seasonal and limited-editions varieties, there are lots of beer brands available with this company. Though Samuel Adams beer varieties are more expensive than the ones manufactured by Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD, Financial) and Molson Coors (TAP, Financial), they sell in larger numbers every year, purely because of the large amount of flavours available with the company.
Molson Coors and Budweiser Beers have been fighting hard to find reasonable foothold in the light beer and regular beer segments; however they have not been able to come close to the performance of Boston Beer Ever since 1988, Anheuser-Busch InBev has reporting loss in sales for every single year until about 2013. Sales have dropped disastrously from about 50 million barrels per year in 1988 to a paltry 16 million barrels in 2013. Molson Coors too has been facing severe problems with respect to the sales of this brand. In the last few years, its brands, Miller and Miller Lite have been reporting decline in sales continuously in the recent past.
For the year 2014 alone, sales of Boston Beer grew by a remarkable 22% and the earnings per share showed an increase of 29% from the last year’s values.
Great brand reputation
There are lots of other factors that are working in favour of the Samuel Adams beer brand to make it one of the most-respected and trusted brands in the US. First and foremost, unlike its peers who try to make their products very complex in the name of innovation, Boston Beer sticks to the basics. Simplicity has been its mantra. Secondly, the company’s CEO, Jim Koch is quite friendly and down-to-earth, which lends lots of transparency to the organisation. Employees are being looked after very well and customer service is always top class. This makes Boston Beer one of the best companies to work with, for the employees all over the globe. With wonderful future prospects, a loyal customer base and high quality of products, Boston Beer has been outperforming its peers by a large margin and it looks like it will continue with this stupendous performance for many more years to come. The trend of share price movement of the company for the last year is seen as follows:
Conclusion
Any company that wants to give its competitors a run for their money should take a leaf out of Boston Beers. The company is a great guideline for growing organisations as it has faced rough storms with style and has come out unscathed from them.
