The role of packaging format, alcohol level and brand in consumer’s choice of beer: A best-worst scaling multi-profile approach

Although beer is widely consumed around the world and has the largest market share among alcoholic beverages, there is a paucity of studies on consumers’ preferences for beer compared to wine. In this study, consumers were asked to select the best and worst favorable beer from choice sets of a labeled choice experiment, in which choice options were labeled by brand names. Data collected from face-to-face interviews with Vietnamese beer-drinkers were used to estimate latent-class ranking logit models with alternative specific-effects, i.e. consumers’ preferences for beer attributes are allowed to vary between beer brands and across four segments. In general, consumers prefer international brands to local ones, possibly due to sales promotion effects, experience, brand image or reflecting the mental representation. Consumers’ favors for packaging format (canned vs. bottled beer) are subject to brands and are heterogeneous across segments. Surprisingly, alcohol percent has the least significant effects on the choice. The paper also discusses the implication of the findings for policy making and business strategy development.