Communications Plan Traditionally, beer is known as a critical part of Germany’s culture and directly translates to their industry practices and market behavior. According to Carroll, Preisendoefer, Swaminathan, and Wiedenmayer (1993), Germany is most notable for the highly fragmented structure of its industry, which contains many more breweries than the larger American industry. However, product concentration has not risen as expected for the market in Germany, which can be attributed to many factors including strong consumer preferences, high transportation costs, and governmental prohibitions specifically define acceptable ingredients used in German beer (Adams, 2006). Germany can increase its market share on a national level by careful and strategic expansion into other beer markets that currently have high demand for beer and less production barriers that counteract cost advantages of large-scale brewing. The most common type of product packaging used in Germany is bottling, which accounts for 60% of beer containment. Of the remaining 40% cans and kegs each makes up 20%. Canning has accelerated production capacity. Canning lines can fill 2,000 containers per minutes versus bottle lines that fill 1,100 containers per minute (Adams, 2006). The bottles used by German brewers are reusable, which adds to the high-cost of production. Expanding into new markets that support an efficient packaging mix, such as the use of canning lines will motivate German brewers to build larger facilities and invest in canning technologies to support increases in sales and revenue. The German Purity Law (Adams, 2006) has also limited large-scale production domestically. The law restricts brewers to only using specific ingredients, which makes domestic beers more perishable and costly to transport. Breweries and product concentration in Germany experienced a noticeable decline