Global Brewing Company
Data science and beer: how we helped a global brewing company raise the bar for its customers
The challenge
The On-trade category in beer is in decline all over the world, and it has been for over 50 years. Our client, a global brewing company, asked us to take a customer-insights-driven approach to identifying opportunities to help their customers, who run and manage bars, restaurants and clubs all over the world.
Our approach
Working with three key markets, we carried out field research with hundreds of different customers. There were many interesting opportunities. We focused ruthlessly on the ones that keep customers up at night, and had the best chance to drive new value back to our client’s business.
We found that the smartest and most entrepreneurial outlet owners and managers in every market already used historical data - mostly spreadsheets - to make better planning decisions. This insight led us to experiment with our client’s historical data about all customers. Our client’s historical data provided a rich foundation that we could combine with further sets of data to provide insights that were millions of times more powerful than their customers could derive from their own data alone.
This became a data science driven tool that’s designed to work in a busy bar environment. It automatically delivers highly actionable ‘suggestions’ (insights) in a conversational format via a web-based mobile app. We focused on creating an experience that minimises the need for customers to spend time interpreting data: it simply offers a data-driven suggestion that’s easy to scan and understand, and easy to action.
When we combined our client’s order data with other data-sets (for example, location, time, events, weather, and POS/till data) we found that we could deliver a rich array of useful and valuable suggestions that change customer behaviour and lead them to:
- Discover trends
- Stock a different assortment of products
- Discover new products that are likely to sell well in their outlet
- Run more successful promotions, like food and beer-pairing for example
- Change their opening hours
- Run promotional events based on national or local events in their area
Designed from the outset for handover to the client
Over the course of 13 months, Made by Many has evolved the tool from being a nice idea on paper into working software in real customers’ hands. We identified the opportunity; developed and validated the idea; designed and built a succession of prototypes; launched a Minimal Viable Product and released it in three markets.
Made by Many has been operating the product, doing everything from customer support to training sales teams. We have integrated our clients’ market teams and their workflow with the product. Now, we are transitioning the product to a newly hired client product team so that they can manage, operate and develop the product and business themselves continuously in future.
Accelerating our client’s digital transformation
This project was conceived as an opportunity to catalyse, accelerate and drive digital transformation within the business. Our client had limited experience of launching digital products, and Made by Many’s ‘Change by Making’ approach provided the opportunity to work in new ways to tackle a real problem. We believe that ‘making’ drives a bias for action, that only making can lead to proof - and proof leads to change.
In this case, the client team used the project to learn how to work in cross-functional teams, collaborate across markets, take a design thinking approach, execute very rapidly and continuously in an agile and lean way - and make, test, learn. The product has functioned like a bootcamp for developing a new mindset and the capabilities required to become digital at the core.
The results
By helping our client’s customers to be more successful, we have created a digital product that increases revenue through increased volume sales for the brewery, as well as driving premiumisation and loyalty. We discovered that people who run bars are thirsty for a simple digital tool - designed around them - that helps them spot patterns and opportunities to grow their businesses that would otherwise be invisible to them.
The product we have created is currently being rolled out in multiple markets globally, with an ambitious plan to launch across all of our client’s markets within the next couple of years. The client has launched a product that’s driving significant incremental spend per month and changing the game in terms of customer relationships, but they’ve also built the foundations of a whole new set of their own digital product capabilities.
