Major Japanese brewers are targeting women to increase beer sales in an effort to overcome sluggish sales of alcoholic beverages, JapanToday reported on July 23. Kirin Brewery Co has assigned female employees to develop cocktails tailored for young women while Sapporo Breweries Ltd. has set up a team composed of seven women to create a new product.Kirin began marketing ”two dogs cocktails” in 350 cc cans on June 18one called ”cassis navel” in a pink can and another called ‘’salty bulldog” in a green canfor around 148 yen. The products were developed by Sakurako Yoshino, 26, and Natsu Mori, 24, who are both in their third year with Kirin. The pair were given the assignment as the company wanted to come up with beers and cocktails that women of the same generation as Yoshino and Mori would enjoy.”I wanted to develop a product that would be more of a pleasure to look at and to taste than the products available, which emphasize ‘osake’ (alcohol),” Yoshino said. Sapporo formed a project team of seven women in their 20s and 30s in the spring of last year to evaluate of product development, market research and public relations from a women’s perspective.Kirin also maintains a group of female employees who carry out sales promotion activities targeted at women. The group participates in the company’s ”Nihombashi Nadeshiko (Japanese women) Project,” holding interchange meetings with women working in Tokyo’s Nihombashi district, and engages in word-of-mouth promotional campaigning. Kirin is aggressively promoting women to higher positions. It is aiming to increase the number of women in managerial positions to 100 by 2015 from about 30 in 2006.The problem, however, is how to elevate talented women employees to executive positions when quite a few leave the company because of marriage or to find a position with another company after for working for Kirin for about five years.