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It might only be a small thing, but I have to break it to you. Asahi anywhere outside Japan is simply low-quality Italian Peroni beer made in Italy and with the Asahi logo slapped on it. It tastes absolutely nothing like Japanese Asahi beer and imo is a waste of money. I hear Britain has alot of domestic beer options but idk shrug.
Ironically "Peroni" sold in the USA is actually domestic Coors labelled as Peroni, while "Asahi" sold in the USA is actually Peroni made in Italy. So "Asahi" in USA is actually the Peroniest beer even more than the stuff that says Peroni on the label. Anyways I hate how trademarks can simply be bought and sold and slapped on whatever as long as the money grubbing conglomerates can make a quick buck. Imo trademarks should exist to protect consumers not corporations, so this should be illegal. See also: "Yashica" Y35.
How would you accomplish this, per legality? Are trademarks only to be licensed to a single point of production? Otherwise how do you tell the difference between a knock-off factory and a simple expansion of the business?
The way a trademark is supposed to work is by tying a company’s reputation to a product. If the product doesn’t meet standards, the consumer learns to distrust the trademark. In this case it sounds like Asahi made the assumption that American audiences would be satisfied with Peroni and, present company excluded, were right on the mark. If people like you become a meaningful market share, then expect Asahi Select (or whatever name) to find its way from a Pacific tanker onto your grocery store at a significant mark-up from the regular.
You could come up with a system similar to PDO that protects how the product is actually made.
Check if the new product is substantially similar to the old one, versus something completely different. Companies shouldn't be able to sell something completely different under the exact same name and mark.
We don't have a counterfactual for this, so we can't really saw how satisfied the consumers are. The market share in the US is absolutely miniscule though, but I find it hard to check the exact numbers. On walmart.com Corona beer has 3550 reviews, while "Asahi" has a grand total of ... 3.
Anyways for companies that abuse brand value at the expense of consumers, it takes time for consumers to learn that the brand is fake, and stop buying it. During that time they can cash out.
Asahi Select isn't even real. It's just something that a domestic brewery that licensed the Asahi mark (in the old days) dreamt up to slap on some other domestic macrobrew. There was never a day in history that an Asahi owned brewery brewed a drop of product ever sold under the name "Asahi Select." Literally "Brew some coors, call it Asahi Select."
Unfortunately when the execs decide on a strategy of plunder, this isn't going to happen. The more they devalue their mark selling completely different stuff, the less likely they are to bring in the genuine article in the future.
Oh, is Asahi Select an actual thing? Whoops, my mistake. The point was that an actual market share would encourage actual importing.
Anyway, I’m not sure how the “completely different” clause is expected to fly. PDO works by obsessively dividing products that are actually quite similar, such that only a few dry sparkling whites are champagne. Something on the same level of granularity would be factory-by-factory, which to be honest would be fairly interesting to have printed on every product, although I suspect that this would be ignored by most consumers if there’s anything more recognizable. Substantive difference, on the other hand, sounds like a 10-year court case with expensive expert witnesses and piddling awards. I’m not sure there’s a convenient bright line there.
Your second point, about brand raiding, I would say is more about the modern high-liquidity stock market rewarding various pump-and-dump schemes. At that point I’d wonder whether allowing shareholders to sue executives for fraud following one of these events would move the needle any, or whether you need different financing plans altogether.
Due to the way the import market works for alcohol, there's almost no grey market. So if the corporation doesn't want to specifically send the real stuff to you, you're not going to get it any way you go about it. I don't believe it's possible for a private citizen in the US to legally get a can of Japanese made Asahi even if he had a blank check.
So you take Peroni beer. Something with a hundreds of years old recipe, from even before Italy existed, made with Italian ingredients, in an Italian factory, just like Mussolini liked it. Then you slap on the label "Asahi" and some Japanese looking characters and bam you have "Asahi." Should be an open and shut case honestly. Maybe there are other cases that are more borderline, and maybe the court can err in the favor of the company in those cases, but really there are tons of cases that are very black and white.
Maybe I'm just living in fantasy land, but trademarks are too important to trade for consumers as well as producers to simply be treated as chattel that can simply be bought and sold like buildings or cars.
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Asahi in the UK is actually brewed at what was/is the Fuller's Brewery site in West London. Now I thought that Peroni that we got in the UK is imported from Italy directly, although I've seen some conflicting information that it might be brewed in Scotland. Regardless, I don't think that the Asahi-Peroni identity holds true in Britain at least. All the other "foreign" supermarket lagers (except some of the Czech ones) are brewed in the UK, mostly up near Stoke and in the North West.
Nope: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/314947321
I believe Asahi yanked all of their licenses to local breweries and switched it all to Peroni. I can't say 100% though but at the very least all US and EU and UK is Peroni.
Huh, the more you know. I wonder if they'll make the switch at some point in the future to shorten supply chains further.
I don't believe Asahi owns any breweries in the US. This whole Peroni thing seems to be part of their push to capture more value through vertical integration, as when licensing the mark the licensee gets to keep a big cut. The peroni factory was almost certainly chosen because it's probably the cheapest out of any macrobrew in their global holdings.
For Europe, I'd imagine that Italy is considered domestic for all intents and purposes. Maybe things will change after Brexit but as long as there's no tariffs I don't see it changing anytime soon.
If they acquire any factories in North America, I'm sure they'll start using those for that region's production.
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I've got no strong feelings about Asahi, it's alright. I only chose it because it's the only beer I had twice this trip, and thus noted the price. I think the British version is okay, nothing to write home about.
I normally drink Tennent's, or ciders, but I'm really not picky about my liquor.
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Is this actually true? I thought it tasted different in the UK but I assumed it was just a vibe thing.
No jokes in this post unfortunately. Around 10 years ago Asahi beer was still imported to the US for certain sizes (1L and 2L cans, interestingly enough), tasting it side by side with the US brewed licensed swill gave an insanely obvious difference. The Italy-made swill isn't like old US-licensed swill, but similarly it's not at all like Japanese Asahi.
The level of difference is like the difference between Bud Light -> Guinness - it's not even the same category of beer.
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