The first few weeks of our subject expose you to various crucial concepts that help us understand competitive advantage and how firms can seek to build advantage. This essay gives you a chance to apply these concepts to our focal industry and demonstrate your grasp of the connection to advantage. As competitive advantages (by definition) differ between breweries, and in different contexts, you have the chance to focus in on one brewery.
The Brewery Options
There are six different breweries you can look at. You must pick one. For each there is at least one lengthy interview (a podcast or video) which serves as your prinicipal data source for the essay, as well as additional news stories. All are available from the Discussion Board linked from the brewery names below:
Brewlander from Singapore
Cheeky Monkey from Australia
Dokkaebier from the USA
Heads of Noosa from Australia
Omnipollo from Sweden
Wildflower from Australia
The Questions
For your chosen brewery, upon listening to the interview and the brewery’s perspective, you need to address the following four questions:
What do you see as the most promising competitive advantage that this brewery has built? And why?
What resources or capabilities do you see as most important for supporting this advantage? And why?
How does this advantage positively alter one of the Five Forces this brewery faces?
In light of these three responses, what is the most impactful strategic choice you believe the brewery should make in the next six months? And why?
How to Tackle this
To address these questions, you should:
Listen closely to the interview, and think about what stands out as important and significant.
Consider how you can add value to, or scrutinise, the claims made in the interview. Read through the framework(s) in the textbook and associated readings, think about what was discussed in the relevant lectures, and consider what elements are applicable here.
Make sure you are explicitly illustrating your application of the framework (i.e. walk us through it), with evidence from the interview itself, the other resources we have provided, and any additional research you have done.
Perhaps explore the brewery’s website, reviews of their beer/venue etc as additional evidence.
Consider this brewery’s specific Fives Forces context. This may involve exploring industry data, such as in the IBISWorld report on Australia from Week 3’s and the Statista reports for specific countries.
Reread the questions. Make sure you are doing exactly what is asked. Home in the most promising, the most important and the explanations for why. Make the connections between your different component answers very clear.
Be creative and thoughtful. If you think the brewery’s advantage rests on a combination of factors, then explain that. If you weighed up some options, perhaps walk us through why you decided upon the specific choice or selection.
See below for further research guidance.
Research Tips
Please DO NOT contact the firms themselves for information. These firms are small and busy and are not aware we have set them for the assignment. They do not have time to respond to your emails, and we do not want you using the information they might give you. Please use data you can find in the public domain.
Format
The maximum length of the submission is 1500 words (not including the bibliography or essay title, but including any figures, tables and in text references). Do NOT exceed the word limit, as any content beyond the 1500 words will simply not be read. If you are considerably over when you have a full draft, then read each sentence carefully. Ask yourself “does my argument work without this?”. Most adverbs are unnecessary. Avoid excessive adjectives. If you’re joining two (or more) clauses with “and”, perhaps they could be two sentences instead. Please state an accurate word count on the first page. Please use a 12point font.
Please indicate on the first page (i.e. in the title), which brewery you are looking at. The title does NOT form part of the word count). Please do not include an Abstract or Executive Summary. Please do not include a Table of Contents. Please do number your pages.
The submission should be written as a clear, concise document, using full sentences. Avoid bullet points, as they are usually incomplete sentences and lack sufficient explanation (use them only to list ideas you have or will explain). The document should be professionally presented and well structured. The essay should have an introduction and conclusion. We want to read analysis in your own words. Any ideas taken from other authors most be correctly cited, and any direct quotes must be explicitly identified. Please use the APA system of referencing. The library has prepared a website to help students correctly reference. To cite a podcast, see here. Please also read through the University guidelines around the use of AI.
As it says in the Instructions (under Format), “The document should be professionally presented and well structured. The essay should have an introduction and conclusion.”
So, yes it does need to be an essay. of course, you also want to make it as clear as possible that you have addressed each question (and the components therein), and where you have done so. So, yes, it would wise to have headings/sections so that it is most apparent what is being answered where.
I strongly advise you to consider writing more than a paragraph on each question. I say this as 1500 words divided by 4 is 375 words each question. Even allowing for the introduction and conclusion, a 300 word paragraph is a pretty challenging read. From a readability perspective, I would suspect you will find you use more than one per section (or perhaps your headings will be more fine-grained than the specific questions).
https://www.brewlander.com/pages/our-story
https://www.enjoydkb.com
https://www.headsofnoosa.com.au/about-us
https://omnipollo.com
https://wildflowerbeer.com/pages/about
