Highland Brewing Company: A Case of Product and Experience Design

In this chapter, we dissect the complex product and experience entanglement that is craft beer, highlighting that this product is about much more than what goes into the bottle. In doing so, we anchor our investigation within a real-life case study of Highland Brewing Company (HBC), the first legal craft brewery in Asheville (est. 1994). Through in-depth interviews with HBC’s executive team, brewmasters, and functional leaders, along with rigorous analysis of the industry context, we show how HBC has wrestled with these issues and how their perception of value has evolved from the bottle to include, and even emphasize, the HBC experience. Doing so will not only provide a company-centric perspective of the craft beer tourism industry and the opportunity it affords, but will also help managers across varied contexts conceptualize the multidimensionality of a firm’s value proposition and experience. In today’s world, great products are not enough to differentiate brands and compete in hyper-competitive industries (Kilian, Sarrazin, & Yeon, 2015). Instead, organizations must encapsulate them with great services and experiences to create heightened levels of value to achieve long-lasting competitive advantage. Furthermore, representatives from the local tourism industry can benefit from a deeper understanding of the opportunities and challenges that craft brewers face, so that they might more effectively package their own value propositions to support richer interactions and facilitate higher levels of value co-creation. We begin the chapter by providing needed background information on HBC, its founder Oscar Wong, and the craft beer industry. We then begin the exploration into the HBC experience in an effort to appreciate its complexity and multidimensionality.