Adams Beverage Group interviews Jon Winsell about alcoholic beverage advertising online
The quality of web marketing in the beverage alcohol business ranges from non-existent, to curious, to awful, to compelling. But even as the quality varies, web marketing is increasingly becoming an integral part of the over-all marketing scheme for most brands. ID Society is a leading strategic, interactive design and marketing agency which implements strategic, online marketing programs designed to acquire, engage, and retain customers. The group currently handles such Diageo brands as Baileys, Capt. Morgan, Crown Royal and Johnnie Walker, and has worked with Chivas Regal and Martell, among others. According to their own site "(W)e strengthen the bond between the products we produce and the people who use them. Each Web site we create acts as a flash-point of connectivity, forging links between businesses and customers, person to person. Relationships remain at the heart of everything we do, but it’s our mastery of technology that adds innovation. Our relationship-focused programs enable us to remain ahead of emerging information channels, applying the best technology to meet the overarching goal." To get some insight on the web marketing world, we spoke with Jon Winsell, Director of Strategic Services for ID Society.
Question #1
Adams Beverage Group (ABG): Web marketing continues to grow at a rapid rate, with more sophisticated sites offering consumers a greater connection with brands. But how can you gauge success in the beverage alcohol business, where direct sales from a supplier aren’t allowed?
Jon Winsell: Since we can’t measure success in an ecommerce, total sales manner, we have to define different metrics based on the consumer’s value. What you’re asking is: What is the net worth of a customer? From the brand team’s perspective, you have to start with an understanding of who your best customers are and how much they spend on the brand. We need to assess how often they buy the product and for how many years. For example, a loyal fan may buy 4 bottles of Brand X per year for 5 years. If this is a $40 product, a single customer (or email address!) is worth $800. The Holy Grail, in digital strategy, is getting new customers into your loyalty program. A loyalty program will identify your best consumers and keep them close to the brand. Building an online database of 25,000 consumers, for example, will yield a $20 million asset.
Question #2
ABG: What are the keys to building a site that complements the retail side?
Winsell: Given the three-tier system, our hands are often tied from the producers’ ability to support retail. They cannot show any preference to any retailer, making even a simple zip-code based "Retail Finder" quite an exercise. Nonetheless, I believe that many sites can improve their approach to content creation and distribution from the retailers’ perspective. Providing tasting notes, shelf-talkers, ratings, and downloadable PDFs can give retailers more of the tools they need to promote certain brands.
Question #3
ABG: Why do you believe that many sites in the beverage alcohol industry are missing their target audience?
Winsell: Clearly it’s a big challenge to get the right message to the right people at the right time. Brands that miss their target audience may be too firmly entrenched in their internal perception of who the consumer is, versus who is really drinking the product.
But the real problem comes from not fully appreciating the wisdom and successes of truly targeted marketing. Before you can create a message directed to your target, you need to know who that target is. It’s more about psychographics than demographics, more about consumer behavior than income level. Let’s face it, many brands attract more than one audience and those audiences can be quite diverse. 1800 Tequila has a strong urban market presence in Detroit and Oakland that is quite different from the Ultimate Margarita Makeover party targeted to suburban housewives.
By segmenting your communication planning and delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time, you can build a truly effective messaging strategy that will deliver success.
Question #4
ABG: How does creating a site for Ciroc vodka, a niche product, differ from working on, say, the 1800 tequila site, which is a major brand already?
Winsell: It’s still all about awareness and acquisition. Sometimes brands that are seemingly pre-defined present challenges in creating the right message for the right audience. With Ciroc, we identified key influencers to "spread the word" that this is an excellent product. We targeted bartenders and created information pieces that told Ciroc’s story directly to them.
Differentiating itself from a crowded and growing marketplace is also a challenge for 1800 Tequila. From the consumer’s perspective, what is the real difference between Jose Cuervo and 1800 Tequila? Telling the 1800 Tequila, 100% Blue Agave authentic story does separate 1800 from JC and Patron. It’s real. It’s attainable with no pretense. We wanted that message to come through clearly on the new Web site in both messaging and imagery. Even the Macromedia Flash preloader tells the 100% Agave story.
Question #5
ABG: What’s the hardest thing to achieve for a beverage alcohol client on the Web?
Winsell: It’s difficult to sustain traffic over time. You need to build engaging content and most brands are quite focused on the heritage and folklore, story-telling phase. Once consumers read that, they’re done. How do you keep them coming back? The key is to leverage all offline marketing activities (POS, in-store tastings, events, celebrities) online. Turn your activities and promotions into online campaigns. Drive consumers to the site through contests, sweepstakes, and by simply ensuring a ubiquitous URL on all packaging. Relevant and engaging content give consumers a reason to return.
Question #6
ABG: Are you incorporating the growing trend in customer-created content to any of your client sites?
Winsell: Customer-generated content is a double-edged sword (as the Chevy Tahoe team discovered). Giving the consumer a "voice" and allowing them to express themselves means giving up control of your brand messaging. Guess what? That "control" was an illusion to begin with. How consumers perceive your brand has always been in the consumers’ hands-not the brand’s marketing team. So, you need to recognize that before you decide to give them the means to facilitate that expression.
Crown Royal enjoys truly adoring fans that love the purple bag. We created an online forum that allowed consumers to upload pictures that expressed their love for the bag. Some of the images were hilarious, from a Crown Royal purple bag sweater for a cat, to a woman’s bikini top. Sure, you have to weed out some of the risqué pictures, but overall, this was a great exercise in allowing Crown Royal fans to express their attraction to the brand.
Question #7
ABG: What’s the next big thing for website marketing and design?
Winsell: I believe that we’ve only scratched the surface in creating engaging, interesting and relevant Web sites that acknowledge and reward the consumer relationship. At ID Society, we strive for new ways to express the brand’s value on more of an experiential platform-not just a corporate brochure, but a site that informs consumers of events and plants seeds for increasing and diversifying
product usage. We want our consumers to experience the brand through the site, and walk away feeling rewarded and special. Isn’t that all anyone wants?
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