Publications
Publications
- January 2022
- HBS Case Collection
White Claw: Defending Market Share as Competition Encroaches
By: Jill Avery
Abstract
By the end of 2019, two brands accounted for 84% of hard seltzer sales, a segment that had recently taken the U.S. beer market by storm, growing from $3 million in 2015 to over $2.7 billion by the start of the summer of 2020. White Claw was the dominant market leader with a 58% market share. This made competition in the segment increasingly fierce. Analysts were worried about fragmentation and commoditization in the category, which had grown from 10 brands in 2018 to more than 65 by 2020. How could White Claw best drive the category’s transition from niche to mainstream and how could it hold onto to and/or expand its market share as the category exponentially grew? White Claw was quickly becoming the “Kleenex” of hard seltzer, so the team need to further differentiate itself from encroaching competitors. Should the team narrow the currently broad target market as competitors launched increasingly microtargeted offerings? Should they lower price as generic hard seltzers hit the market? And, how could the team best manage the White Claw brand to mitigate their chances of riding a boom-to-bust lifecycle of a fad product?
Keywords
Brand Management; Competition; Growth Strategy; First-mover Advantage; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Competitive Strategy; Consumer Products Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; North America
Citation
Avery, Jill. "White Claw: Defending Market Share as Competition Encroaches." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 522-064, January 2022.