Mountain Man Brewing Company: Bringing the Brand to Light

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Introduction:

Launching into a new product market segment using an existing brand has the capacity of either eroding or strengthening the products with both its core customers and the new customer base. In this case study Chris Prangel is faced with the dilemma on how he can increase the value of the company and boost sales by introducing a new product using brand name mountain man without eroding the brand value with its original core customers. The success of the Mountain man lager has been largely due to brand awareness and loyalty and positioning of the brand and products as authentic, high quality tough beer targeting blue collar middle to lower income men over age 45. Introducing a new mountain man light beer to serve the growing market trends and demographics would have various implications to the company (Abelli, 2007). This paper presents the problems faced by Mountain Man, alternative solutions to the problems with their advantages and disadvantages and gives a recommendation of the way forward.

Problems faced by Mountain Man in introduction of Mountain light:

With falling revenues from its core product, aging demographic market and changing preferences in the beer market, Mountain Man is faced with the challenge of finding a way of maintaining its strong positioning in the market. From Chris' projections he has noted that following a status quo position with a possible 2% fall in the company's bases annual revenues per year would render the company unprofitable in five years. With better opportunity presenting itself in the light beer market segment where the market is experiencing an upward trend with customers being more younger and less likely to be loyal to a specific brand, Chris' financial projections show that introduction of Mountain Man light into the market had the potential of not only increasing its market share in the beer industry and strengthening its positioning and profitability over a two year period, but also could be able to offset any negative impact that it would have on the overall Mountain Man brand with its core customers (Abelli, 2007).

With the introduction of Mountain man light though a number of problems are presented. Introduction of the light beer had the potential impact of eroding and diluting the brand equity of Mountain ...