As the season turns to spring, one of the many things you will begin to see is more people enjoying beer. With the warmer weather, the beer companies are gearing up to have their best ads to stimulate beer consumers to buy their particular brand of beer. From the outsider point of view, there are only a few brands with a national reach and  likely. at the end of the year the percentages of market share will be about the same as they are before the season, but things change. Sometimes ads become the ads of the summer adopted in the culture and drive sales of brands higher. If you work in the consumer goods strategy, there are not many books written about every type of consumer goods, but there are books written about beer and the selling of it. One such book that found its way into a library is read called Lager Heads by Paul Brent,  HarperCollins, Toronto, 2004. This book is about the Canadian market where two beer companies have most of the market share and the book gives a history of two companies trying to read the market, using the best creative minds available (ad agencies), and fighting to ensure the market share they have is the one they continue to have in order to reap the profits.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, consumer companies which pay a dividend are in competition but the competition tends to be among 3 or 4 companies with two of them seemingly having the upper hand. As you own the shares, you can watch the ads to see if they motivate you or do you believe the ads motivate the target market? In the case of beer companies the age between minimum drinking age to 25 is the heaviest users and the ads tend to be aimed at them.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions