That's the title of a new paper I have with Trey Malone in the journal Agribusiness. The paper uses survey data from over 1,500 U.S. beer drinkers to investigate different types of consumers (or market segments) mainly based on familiarity and taste perceptions of different brands. Trey pulled together these figures based on the different segments identified.
We had this to say:
“the objective of this article is to compare differences in perceptions for each of the brewery groups (domestic, import, large craft, and microbrewery).Figures 4 and 5 display the taste perception and brand familiarity averages for each beer segment we included. As canbe seen in Figure 4, the uninformed cluster has consistently low perceptions of the taste of the beers in all segments,whereas the maven cluster has consistently high perceptions of taste of the beers in all segments. Premium patronsrate the domestic beers as one of the worst tasting and appreciate the taste of the large craft and import optionssubstantially more. Traditional drinkers prefer the taste of domestic and import beers more than the beers provided inthe large craft and microbrew segments. Finally, the locavores did not heavily prefer the taste of any of the beers. Ascan be seen in Figure 5, few consumers were familiar with the microbrew options at all, although the mavens weremost familiar. Uninformed participants were only somewhat familiar with the other beers in the sample, whereasthe premium patrons were very familiar with all of the beers in the sample, with the exception of the microbrews.Traditional drinkers were most familiar with domestic and import beers, whereas the locavores were also very familiarwith all of the beers with the exception of the microbrews. These differences in perceptions suggest that consumers inthe locavore segment, while unfamiliar with the microbrews listed, still consider those beers to taste good.”