In 1989, Coors Brewing was on a roll. They had just completed the national rollouts of both Coors and Coors Light beers across the US and had grown to be the third largest brewer in the country, after Miller and Anheuser Busch. Pete Coors, the 4^th-generation family CEO of Coors Brewing was trying to figure out the next big move for the company, when he got a call from the R&D department – they had just made a long-awaited breakthrough.

After years of trying, Coors’s scientists had figured out how to make a colorless, flavorless, odorless beer – or said in a more appealing way, a carbonated, moderately alcoholic beverage that could be made to taste or look like anything from Cola to Sprite to any other cold, fizzy drink. Pete was very enthused about the idea and thought it could be the idea that finally allowed Coors to directly challenge Miller and AB.

After considering many options, the Coors team choose to develop a totally new flavor for their invention, and Zima was born. Introduced nationwide with a huge marketing budget in 1993, Zima was one of the great marketing disasters of recent years. Zima was a clear “alternative” beverage with a unique flavor – sufficiently unique that seemingly no one liked it. Despite tens of millions of dollars of marketing investment, Zima never found a significant following and was, eventually, discontinued entirely in 2008.

But for many years, increasing after the Zima patent expired in 2006, many marketers played around with the concept of building a successful product out of a beer-like product that could taste like … anything. Among the entrepreneurial companies working in this field was a Vancouver-based company called Mark Anthony Brands. In 1999, they used the Zima technology to create a lemony product called Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Mike was (and is) basically beer reformulated to taste like fizzy alcoholic Lemonade. And it has been a successful product over the last 20 years. But it has never grown to rival the large beer brands.

Mike’s is a profitable multi-hundred-million-dollar brand, but Mark Anthony Brands wanted to grab for the brass ring. Founder and CEO Anthony Von Mandl challenged his team to come up with an idea that would make Mike’s success seem small by comparison.

Surprisingly, the team came back with an idea that was very simple but seems to have hit a nerve with consumers – flavored hard seltzer. The team realized that while capturing new and unusual flavors was interesting to food engineers, what consumers

want is something that is very clear and simple. Everyone drinks water. Many people drink flavored carbonated waters. And many people are often looking for a little alcoholic kick to add to their drinks. And it does not take long to explain this concept to anyone. When you see hard seltzer in a store you immediately know what it is.

In 2016, Mark Anthony Brands introduced White Claw hard seltzer in 6 flavors, and it immediately took off. It more than doubled in size each year from 2016 to 2021, and in 2021 was a $ 3 billion brand in multiple countries and 16 flavors. Growth was fueled by novelty in 2017-19 and, to a certain extent, by Covid in 2020-21. Covid led to a significant increase in alcohol consumption, especially at home – and flavored seltzer somehow met the need that Covid created. The White Claw business is still doing well in 2022, but it is no longer exploding. Growth in 2022 is expected to be about 10%.

Meanwhile, the overall hard seltzer market has been growing faster than White Claw. In 2016, White Claw was the market, but in 2021, White Claw had a 58% share of hard seltzer, followed by Truly with 26% and a large range of newer competitors with shares ranging from 0%-6%. And the competitors are a large range of companies, ranging from giant companies like AB InBev with Bud Light Seltzer to independent entrepreneurs. Some of the new competitors are very similar to White Claw, but others like Bud Light, Smirnoff, and Corona attempt to leverage existing brand names, and others, like High Noon, highlight the idea that they are made with traditional alcohol like vodka.

So White Claw now faces a much more complex and quickly evolving market than in the earlier years. Growth is slowing, but it continues to be robust on the category level and significant on the brand level. The question is how to keep growing, hopefully as quickly as the category to maintain the large market share. And that is where you come in. Your assignment is to develop a strategic marketing plan for White Claw Hard Seltzer for 2023. What should we change and what should we keep the same? What should we add and what should we subtract? How should we manage each of the 4 Ps to drive growth and hold market share?