Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the monthly e-zine, CPGmatters.
About three years ago, Diageo began making a commitment to proactively working with its retailer-customers on a number of shopper marketing programs. That commitment particularly involved better understanding how consumers actually shopped the spirits category in the store.
"People are on autopilot when they're shopping for, maybe, bread or other grocery staples," Shawn Fitzgerald, Diageo's director of shopper planning, told CPGmatters. "But [spirits] are a more engagement-oriented shopper experience, more similar to personal- or beauty-care items. It's more fun. So the insights that are driving our strategies and activations in the store are really around how do we tap into the state of mind that the consumer is in?"
Delving into its customer base, the owner of Guinness, Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and other spirits brands was also surprised to find out that women are the primary shoppers for spirits and liquors, not men. Further, while notable occasions -- New Year's Eve, etc. -- were certainly big drivers of liquor sales, it found consumers' definition of an "occasion" was much looser and more casual than imagined previously.
"We had a tendency to focus on the big events," explained Mr. Fitzgerald. "But the reality is that those occasions are the minority. There are a lot of other, more frequent occasions that happen throughout the year, and tapping into shoppers for those occasions is a bigger opportunity."
Like what? Informal get-togethers with friends, maybe even spontaneous ones, on the front porch or patio, or hosting a Thursday-evening party. "It wasn't that we didn't understand those were going on," Mr. Fitzgerald said, "but we reframed our thinking about how to focus on more year-round events.
"It sounds simple after the fact, but it's actually a very powerful change and transformation in our thinking."
Harnessing those shopper insights, Diageo has been developing, among other things, a "Simply Cocktails" merchandising initiative.
The idea is simple: Create a display and merchandising area for retailers where shoppers are drawn into curiosity about making cocktails out of Diageo spirits brands and complementary products. "Our insight was that cocktails are appealing to people, but there is an intimidation factor if they're making cocktails for themselves or others," Mr. Fitzgerald said. "Anything we could do to make that easier or less intimidating would help."
The Diageo displays have a "Simply Cocktails" banner and, in their fully deployed mode, three adjacent displays of different types of spirits, soft drinks and other complementary products. Each of these displays comprises a particular "level of difficulty" for shopper who wants to make cocktails. "Ready/Pour" is one, "Simple Mix" is the next step up, and "Easy Shake" is the highest level.
"'Easy Shake' is the most complicated, but even it is relatively easy to do," Fitzgerald said. "The idea is to provide different solutions to help people with different types of occasions or different levels of sophistication" in preparing cocktails.
Tests of the Simply Cocktails concept with selected retailers showed an average 11 percent return across the Diageo brands involved. And Mr. Fitzgerald said that the company is looking for "directionally consistent" results at its retailer partners as more test and roll out the concept.