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ABSTRACT
Despite decades of domination by a few large companies, the American beer market has seen a dramatic resurgence of microbreweries. Contrary to conventional oligopolistic market theories, small firms have consistently gained market share from their entrenched competitors. Researchers have attributed this success to “neolocalism.” Through their marketing, microbreweries appeal to consumers’ desire for connections to real people and distinctive products from local places. However, no study has verified whether this pattern is most characteristic of microbreweries. With newer firms threatening their market share, larger firms might adopt neolocal claims, but little empirical attention has been directed at large brewers, and mid-sized, regional firms have been largely ignored by researchers. This paper uses content analysis of beer packaging to investigate the nature of the appeals made to consumers. I find that while microbreweries do make neolocal claims, regional breweries are more likely to associate their products with places on a local scale. Large breweries make few such claims, but instead rely on “reflexive branding”: marketing that refers back to the brand itself rather than borrowing existing symbolism from people or places. These findings partly support the neolocal perspective, but also challenge our expectations of which firms use neolocal appeals the most.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the American Sociological Association in Montréal (2017). I would like to thank Matthew Wranovix for his help in locating an elusive observation for the data.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Psychology and Sociology at the University of New Haven. His research examines the social significance of physical and cultural environments and spatial behaviors. His work has appeared in a number of scholarly journals, such as Social Psychology Quarterly and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and he is the author of Punk Rock and the Politics of Place (Routledge, 2014).
Notes
1. Based on the Brewers Association’s classification (Citation2016b), which defines “micro” breweries as those firms producing fewer than 15,000 barrels per year.
2. I excluded brewpubs when their products could only be purchased on premises and, therefore, likely experience different marketing realities (Mathews and Patton Citation2016). Contract breweries – which do not brew but simply brand products they hire others to produce – were similarly excluded.
3. These included Blue Moon, Coors, and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Sierra Nevada was a national best-seller in 2016, but excluded because it is regionally-sized and headquartered outside New England. Two cases were excluded because they consisted of several rotating beverages and not a single product.
4. On account of mergers and exchange of brands among companies, the exact number of companies represented varies from year-to-year, but never exceeds six during 2012–2017.
5. For both regional and microbreweries, each company generally produced more than one beverage. For this reason, I selected the product for analysis at random from those available at the time of sampling, comparing selected brands to the company’s other brands to ensure reasonable representativeness in packaging style.
6. I referenced websites to clarify information (e.g., the meaning behind a product’s name) since many packaging elements reflect content not readily recognizable to non-locals (Schnell and Reese Citation2003).
7. Wolaver’s has been discontinued.
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