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New trends in beer markets across Europe bring new challenges to beer brand management. As brand equity is an outcome of consumers’ perceptions of a certain brand, it is necessary to investigate how consumers perceive brands in various industries. The chapter tackles this topic from the perspective of younger adults in Croatia in 2019, by putting into focus gender differences in attitudes toward beer brands in retail purchasing. The presented findings indicate that for both young males and females, quality, taste, and continuous availability are important aspects of beer brands. The packaging, label design, and social aspects of a brand are more influential on females than on males. The chapter contributes to better understanding of brand management issues when approaching younger consumers. In addition, observed gender differences enable beer brand managers to fit their approach to narrow niches within the population of young consumers.

This chapter discusses why youth are commercially interesting and why marketing seems to be targeting children at ever-younger ages. In particular, it shows how children represent three markets—a primary market, a market of influencers, and a future market—and discusses the implications of being a threefold market for children's socialization as consumers. How do brand awareness and brand loyalty develop in early childhood? How does children's development influence their consumer behavior? Following this, the chapter evaluates whether advertising is effective among these young consumers. To what extent does the commercial environment that surrounds youth influence them? It contextualizes these questions by highlighting what the youth market looks like today, noting sophisticated digital developments and discussing efforts to counter the potential negative consequences of advertising.

German consumers indicate a strong affection for locally produced beer brands and demand varies significantly throughout the year. Particularly, brands distributed nationwide need to consider consumer loyalty towards local brands (spatial pricing) and the seasonality of demand (temporal pricing) in their pricing strategy. Anderson and Kumar (2007) and Chevalier et al. (2003) develop models to derive hypotheses for the optimal spatial and temporal pricing strategies under these circumstances. Contrary to the neoclassical intuition, brands promote more aggressively on their home markets (strong brand loyalty) and in periods of peak demand. Employing retail scanner data for German beer, the chapter finds ample evidence to support these hypotheses, indicating that brand loyalty may be a dynamic concept and consumer search is more intensive in periods of high demand.

German consumers indicate a strong affection for locally produced beer brands and demand varies significantly throughout the year. In particular, nationwide distributed brands need to respond to consumer loyalty towards local brands (spatial pricing) and the seasonality of demand (temporal pricing) through their pricing strategy. Some theoretical models derive hypotheses for optimal spatial and temporal pricing strategies under these circumstances. Contrary to neoclassical intuition, brands promote more aggressively in their home markets and in periods of peak demand. Employing a detailed data set of weekly promotional prices for German beer during the period from 2000 to 2012, we find evidence to support these hypotheses. The results indicate that brand loyalty has dynamic effects and consumer search is more intensive in periods of peak demand.

This chapter extends the notion of community to include customers. It focuses on how organizations are bringing together informal groups of customers via the Internet to exchange knowledge, build brand loyalty, and provide unique insights into product design and use. The components of a customer community space and King Arthur Flour's creation of its online customer community — the Baking Circle — are discussed.

This chapter explains the proposition in marketing semiotics that goods can transcend their functional purposes and have a symbolic value or an emotional meaning for the consumer. It examines the psychic, cognitive, and structural operations motivating the consumer to develop such attachments to certain brands, which can then be used to reposition it or develop brand loyalty. For example, Levi-Strauss has employed principles of collective unconscious, deep structure of culture and the general codes, and cultural systems. These principles of structural anthropology can lead to “generalized” assumptions toward understanding the consistencies or any eccentricities and differences in cultures when launching a new product.

This chapter examines the rise of the middle-class motorcyclist and how their impact on motorcycle culture shaped the public's perception of motorcyclists. Postwar affluence and an increasingly pervasive consumer culture contributed to the 1960s “craze” for motorcycling. The middle-class motorcycle enthusiast made motorcycling respectable and family friendly and stood in sharp contrast to the traditional working-class rider. The middle-class rider was simply better at consuming motorcycles than producing them and affected a style that highlighted those differences. The potential to change motorcycling culture was clear, and it translated into an increasingly bitter debate over brand-name loyalty, highlighting the ways in which race shaped motorcycle culture but also reflected a deep-seated class divide that became more conspicuous as consumption became one of the defining issues dividing motorcyclists.

This chapter assesses whether the innovation strategies of challenger parties are successful in terms of extending their voter base and generating more votes. Challenger parties innovate by mobilizing high appropriability issues that are difficult to handle for dominant parties because they risk splitting their rank and file. Challenger parties also aim to protect their innovation and first-mover advantage by discrediting rivals. This twofold approach based on policy and rhetoric is aimed at increasing electoral appeal and thus breaking the brand loyalty of voters to dominant parties. The chapter then considers two expectations which can be derived from this book's theory of political change. First, challenger parties that innovate want to attract new voters, and by doing so break the market power of dominant parties. Second, when choosing a challenger over a dominant party, voters should be voting on the basis of high appropriability issues and motivated by antiestablishment considerations. The chapter empirically tests these expectations by combining data for over 200 parties between 1950 and 2017 in 18 West European countries with survey data for over 18,000 individuals in 17 West European countries in 2014.

Institutions and ownership play a central role in the transformation and development of the beer market and the brewing industry. Institutions set the external environment of the brewery through both formal requirements and the informal acceptance of these companies’ operations by the public, whereas the owners and their managers adapt to these external challenges but also follow their own agenda in setting up strategies for innovation, marketing, takeovers, and so on. The thirteen chapters in this book cover changes in a range of areas, such as excise tax, zoning regulation, trade liberalization, consumers’ habits and tastes for beer, and sales regulation of alcohol. Breweries’ responses have included a craft beer revolution with a surge in demand for special flowered hops, a globalization strategy from the macrobreweries, outsourcing by contract brewing, and knowledge exchange for small-sized breweries, among others.