Westvleteren is officially the best beer in the world. It's pretty hard to buy this beer: you need to call the brewer and you can only buy a limited amount of beer at the same time.
The packaging of the beer is really unique: the bottles are dark and completely old school. The bottles are stocked in dark wooden boxes. People love the authentic part of this exclusive drink. The combination of the packaging, being selected as the best beer and the difficulty to buy it, makes this a very popular product all over the world. On some days, people in New York offer 10 times its value on eBay to buy the product.
During one of my workshops, I learned that at a certain point, the brewer considered to replace the wooden boxes by plastic boxes. Imagine what this would do to the beer… I’m convinced that the popularity of the beer would decrease. It would decrease the brand perception and it would cause negative word-of-mouth. My guess is that it would even lose its position as the best beer in the world.
If you remove a certain part of the brand personality, you decrease the brand identification among your brand buyers and lovers.
Good thing those brewers never changed it afterall.
