Marketing Response Models for Shrinking Beer Sales in Germany

Beer sales in Germany are confronted for several years with a shrinking market share in the market of alcoholic beverages. I use the approach of sales response function (SRF) models as in Polasek and Baier (2010) and adapt it to time series observation of beer sales for simultaneous estimation. I propose a new class of growth sales (gSRF) models having endogenous and exogenous variables as in Polasek (2011) together with marketing efforts that follow a sustained growth allocation principle. This approach allows to model growth rates in markets that are exposed to fierce competition and where marketing efforts cannot be evaluated directly. The class of gSRF models has the property that it models supply (i.e. marketing efforts) and demand factors jointly in a log-linear regression model that are correlated over time. The estimated model can explain the relative success of marketing expenditures for the shrinking beer market in the period 1999-2010.