Page 239 - GLOBAL STRATEGIC MARKETING

Unit 11 – International Niche Strategies for small to medium enterprises (SME’s)

Made much like beer, but without alcohol, Bionade is a fizzy, fruity

hit in Germany. But can it go global?

Ostheim In Der Rhoen is a quiet German town in northern Bavaria.
Picture-book pretty, with narrow, winding streets, it does not look like a

place where anything – let alone anything hip – ever happens. But this
hamlet is the birthplace of Bionade, an all-natural soft drink that has

become a national sensation (it more than tripled sales last year), one that
its creators now hope to take world-wide. Bionade’s founders do not dream

of global conquest for its own sake. They speak passionately about what
they describe as the drink’s deeper meaning. ‘Bionade is a totally idealistic

product. Of course we want to make money, but honestly, this was an
attempt to give people something better’, says Bionade’s CEO, Peter
Kowalsky, 38. It was the shake-up of the German beer industry in the

1980’s that inspired Bionade’s inventor, Dieter Leipold, then master
brewer to quest for a new quaff. With younger German consumers

increasingly choosing imports such as Corona and Miller Lite over local
beers, Leipold worried about the brewery’s future. And there was more at
stake than just business: it was family. He lived with the brewery’s present

owner, Sigrid Peter, now his wife, and acted as stepfather to her sons,
Peter and Stephen Kowalsky.