Quantifying Consumer Tradeoffs Across Firm‐Level Strategic Positioning Dimensions: Evidence from US Craft Beer Consumers

ABSTRACT Strategic positioning becomes increasingly important as markets mature, particularly in consumer‐facing industries that offer similar products, experiential cues, and values‐based messages. This study offers a conceptual model to examine the strategic positioning factors that motivate consumers to visit one local business over another before empirically measuring preferences for each differentiator using experimental data from a national panel of 965 US consumers. Specifically, we measure the relative importance of nine craft brewery attributes across three strategic positioning dimensions using best‐worst scaling data and random parameter logit modeling. The results emphasize the importance of product differentiation, with the average consumer rating it more than twice as important as experiential positioning and nearly four times more important than values‐based differentiation. There is preference heterogeneity, however, with some consumers placing greater relative weight on key experiential and values‐based characteristics. Combined, the results enable strategic recommendations for small businesses and provide a broader research framework for assessing strategic positioning in consumer‐facing industries.