Marketing and Effectuation: A Study of Marketing Practices Among Swedish Microbreweries

The present study aims to analyse the marketing strategies of Swedish microbreweries and relate them to the entrepreneurial principles of effectuation and causation. The authors investigated eight microbreweries in Mälardalsregionen of Sweden, conducting interviews with members of the founding team or the management team at the microbreweries. The results of the study show that most breweries used effectual principles to describe their marketing efforts. Two effectual principles in particular, bird-in-hand and affordable loss, were shown to be present throughout the sample. Furthermore, most microbrewery founders did not give a lot of importance to marketing and considered it to be a part of everyday activities of the brewery rather than a separate organisational function. There was a direct correlation between the size of the microbrewery and its debts, and the marketing efforts of the microbrewery. Based on these results, the authors propose: (1) Microbrewery founders use effectual logics more than causational logics in their marketing efforts; and (2) Microbrewery founders with unawareness or lack of knowledge of the causational methods are more likely to go about their marketing activities using effectual logic