The Bruery: explain how they've done it.

It already is and there are countless books and case studies on other businesses that have followed the exact same formula. What I really want to read is, aside from the "they make great beer" aspect which is entirely subjective, why do people respond so well to it? Why is it that the group of people that buy in to this particular business model in the majority?

 

Yeah, I think what you mean. And there are a ton of reasons for that. Marketing. Hype. Sometimes it's just a matter of being local, people gravitate towards you, as do local restaurants and breweries. Something like 8 new breweries have opened up within driving distance from me over the past 2-3 years. A few of them are great, but a lot of them are forgettable at best.

This is sort of a textbook example of the patterns of a fragmented market, though. An industry surges, everyone jumps on the bandwagon, but after a few years, consumers will know enough about the industry to separate the men from the boys and the forgettable ones will start to disappear.

 

I'm not sure I understand your question. Why do people buy into The Bruery versus other brewing companies? It's like saying why do people prefer Coke to Pepsi. If there was a clean, easy, identifiable answer every company would do it. Overall, though, I think they found a largely untapped niche and tapped into it with superior products. Their products have the uniqueness of Dogfish Head with the upscale sophistication of Ommegang. It's a nice little pocket in the industry that no one else had claimed.

 

And that's really what I'm trying to get at. All those business books out there (In Search of Excellence, Good to Great, Built to Last, ect.) proclaim that, because they analyzed the track record of a couple of successful companies and identified similar traits between their businesses, that those traits must be the secrets to success. Yet, I'm sure there are businesses that tried to incorporate those traits into their business models (just as I'm sure there were breweries that probably followed the same business model The Bruery did) and still failed. To truly understand the success of The Bruery, you would have to understand why people behave the way they do, which as you said, is pretty much impossible but would be the "holy grail" of business strategy. Which is why I would want to read that book.

 

While we're at it, grab me the book that uncovers the meaning of life. Want to make sure this small business thing will be worth it before I go all in.

But yeah, as someone who works in Marketing, I could assure you there is absolutely no way to prove causation in purchasing behavior. The best we could do is use a combination of qualitative and quantities data to show correlation.

Success, in any field, always comes down to the right blend of skill, creativity and discipline mixed with a shit ton of luck. I mean, details aside, The Bruery would never have been so successful, at least not so quickly, if they opened their doors a few years earlier or a few years later. They started up just as the industry was hitting it's biggest boom ever, and just hit the ground running. The timing was perfect, and that was all sheer luck.

 

I can see this - I think it's highly dependent on where you do your everyday beer drinking and who you do it with.

 

My God, if I could like this 1000 times, I would.

I wish the media and alleged scientists would understand what you're saying far beyond even marketing. Some of the recent things I've read in world/national media outlets lead me to believe nobody distinguishes a correlation from causation anymore. . .

 

Haha, I know what you mean. I saw a study once that "proved" people will have a higher IQ if they spend extensive time in rooms with vaulted ceilings. It was one of those huge facepalm moments where I realized most modern science is a joke.

 

I think that the vast majority of scientists understand this. It's taught pretty constantly. Media reports of scientific discoveries are shitty because they come from university press releases, which can be quite awful, and then the reporter/editor's demands which normally distort the science significantly. It's frustrating.

This is not true.

 

the biggest problem with modern science is that people in marketing think they can do it.

also, seriously, who hasn't heard "correlation is not causation" 1000x before 8th grade?

 

Me. Ever.

 

oh. hmm, maybe i thought it was more obvious than it really was. i consider things like six sigma analysis (which is a rigorous way of establishing confidence in correlation) to be pretty obscure, but i had no idea that the above aphorism was new to people.

 

A lot of scientists don't understand the difference between correlation and causation, hence the overwhelming numbers of meta-analyses based studies that yield "interesting" results published as fact by the media. Many researchers' paradigms are completely flawed and show little causation in modern research. I worked in academia for a few years and my biggest complaint was either erroneous findings or poorly designed research that didn't distinguish correlation from causation.

It's not that modern science is a joke - it's that you have a lot of idiots pretending to be researchers or scientists in a futile attempt to get a piece of the ever-dwindling grant pie. On the other hand, there's a lot of excellent stuff being studied and discovered by scientists, but unfortunately it doesn't yield attention-grabbing headlines in the news.

 

It shouldn't be. If people aren't familiar with it it's because of the massive failure that we call an education system.

 

Lol. What's an aphorism? I don't care to know. I was just pointing out the level of silliness people take these discussions to. What was the original question again?

 

i'd argue the bolded part is the problem, which you allude to in the last sentence.

which field did you work in? i've done some consulting on six-sigma analysis and been impressed with the caliber of scientists i've met, but i also realize that guys like this exist.

what i don't understand is this general, mainsteam pooh-poohing of scientists. if you needed surgery, you'd see a surgeon; if you needed a new timing belt, you'd see a mechanic... but if you need some rigorous scientific analysis, you don't go to an expert in the field - because they're all idiots who can be replaced by marketers. this is the first generation where i've seen an entrenched pride in anti-intellectualism, and i don't understand it. part of the reason why i didn't go into science myself; there's no value.

 

You're right - the value of hard science is declining in many fields, and anti-intellectualism is becoming an issue (IMO) due almost entirely to the internet (and the availability of information.) The fact that people working in academia make a disproportionally low wage vs. someone in industry is not exactly alluring to recent grads or career scientists either.

I worked for the dept. of neuroscience at the UCSD school of medicine. We were constantly amazed by our fellow labs' lack of comprehension with statistical analysis and how it yielded inaccurate results (in published papers, nonetheless.) A post doc colleague of mine said the majority of the papers he reviewed had statistical flaws, from study design to data capture. It's much easier to publish "good" results when your study is designed for them.

That said, I think stupac2 hit it way back when he said capital was the reason The Bruery is so successful.

 

Money is tight. Time to compare and make conclusions on n=1 data points.

 

Yeah man, it's all about money. Which is funny, because I think that's a huge reason why The Bruery was successful.

 

Excellent. I had some free time and was wondering what I would do...