Thread by @NoBuzzJoe

If you understand how systems work, you can begin to find potential reasons why the beer industry struggles with gaining respect & extending its market.

Traditional systems are full of inertia that keeps people thinking & acting the same way. No blame. Just the power of systems.

Beer is a rather traditional industry, thus there is going to be a ton of traditional thinking, ideas, & behaviors around attempting to fix beer.

It's no different than education or healthcare where we are constantly addressing the symptoms of a less than ideal industry.

Decreased volumes or sales are symptoms. Implement initiatives or campaigns to boost sales and eventually sales go down again. Industry gets stuck in the loop.

But experience would tell us to do exactly those initiatives and campaigns b/c we have to act fast!

So we slap a band-aid on the leaking crease in our can.

Growth comes from a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset. A growth mindset means divergent thinking, not convergent thinking. What experiments have yet to be run & tested? Things never done before...have to create evidence.

Thinking things about beer that you have never considered before.

Consumers have a ton of inertia in their thinking about products. They have drinking habits. "Habits" is right there and habits are unconscious. A wine drinker attending a beer dinner but going home to a house full of wine has every reason to prefer wine. Context remains.

The point is that one-off events are not going to help change the prevailing context of the consumer. It can be the best event but they will fall back on habits. Not enough repetition to cause lasting change.

Solutions are likely more immersive & iterative over time than 1-off.

The inertia in the existing system keeps both industry people and the consumers they hope to convert stuck. If you want the system to change, you potentially change it by experimenting in another untested direction and hope that those efforts create new inertia.

Test things that are fundamentally different than what the core system prompts for and promotes.

Think more about a L/T process toward some new outcome vs. one-off outputs that only give S/T boosts.

This is the "you have to work for it" part of extending and deepening the experience of beer.

Or, we can just focus on keeping beer fun & not taking the biz side of it so seriously.

Working for it can also be fun while it delivers longer-lasting boosts to the industry.

#beer

@threadreaderapp #unroll

More...beer is a complicated system...brewers, on-premise, off-premise, wholesalers, distro, journalism, consumers, styles, events, regs, etc...

Tweaks to any one factor are likely soon overpowered by the rest..why linear tweaks don't last.

Must deal in the complexity of beer.