Viagra for brands

What do you do with a well-known consumer brand which follows the law of gravity and fails to perform as desired? You sigh resignedly and then spread the cloak of oblivion over it, as did Detroit-based General Motors Corporation? In December, the US car maker decided to discontinue the Olds-mobile brand after decades of pummelling and cajoling and had done nothing to fight the consumer’s growing ennui with the Oldsmobile brand.
Now there are quite a few tired old beer brands out there too. Take the saga of South African Breweries (SAB) and the new improved Lion Lager, for example. Lion Lager, once the pride of certain segments of the South African society, has seen volumes decline rapidly during the 1990s. In 1999 only slightly more than 3m hl of Lion Lager were sold....

Beer market in Africa has big potential

The African beer market has large untapped potential. At a time when the dominant market on the continent, South Africa, is contracting, the second largest market, Nigeria, has big growth opportunities, a population of 120 million with a per-capita consumption of only 5.25 l of beer per annum (a total of 6.3 million hl), compared to South Africa’s 60.47 l per-capita per annum (43.0 million hl).
The size of the African beer market is estimated to be about 62.1 million hl at present. South African Breweries (SAB) are the uncontested market leader, producing 31.8 million hl (25.1 million hl in South Africa alone). Second place is taken by BGI of France (8.1 million hl), followed by Heineken (7.7 million hl) of the Netherlands and Guinness (6.2 million hl) of Britain..