Diageo & thebar.com

Client Story: Diageo
Good Growth - Diageo

The Challenge

Good Growth enabled a global beverage enterprise to take a new DTC offering to market in a matter of weeks.

Thebar.com – a great domain name and a stack of potential, but Diageo felt it was lacking in fizz, and had ultimately gone flat.

The plan was to quickly transform the site from a brochure listing cocktail recipes with no ability to purchase products, into a fully functioning ecommerce proposition in just a few weeks. Normally that kind of speed can be unachievable for large organisations where legacy tech, complex long-term strategies and high risk can cause issues.

However, Good Growth were able to mitigate these problems, and ultimately deliver a site full of flavour with no hangover whatsoever.

thebar.com Re-Imagined

Diageo wanted to offer their world-renowned range of drinks such as Tanqueray, Seedlip and Johnnie Walker directly to consumers. In some markets, where counterfeiting is rife, this was driven by the need to provide consumers with a trustworthy place to buy alcohol.

In others, it was driven by the opportunity to open an additional route to market. In order to provide a compelling offering, Diageo needed to find a new space in the highly competitive and crowded beverage market. Their research suggested that an offering centred around buying gifts online would provide this differentiation.

The challenge was to test this theory with real customers – by offering a complete e-commerce solution with best-in-class order fulfilment to deliver on the promise to customers.

Good Growth worked with Diageo and their design agencies to deliver a fully-functioning e-commerce website, leveraging pre-existing back end systems and operational capabilities, alongside new infrastructure built by Good Growth.

The end result was the first iteration of a brand new thebar.com designed around a gifting experience that included personalised journeys based on the user’s needs, preferences, and budget.

 

how good growth transformed thebar.com

The Good Growth methodology allows fast iterations, refining commercial goals through a series of Test and Learn cycles. Good Growth Technology allows commercial goals to be delivered without touching existing infrastructure. This reduces costs by removing complexity, and by iterating to the goal and removing the need for complex re-engineering, the total risk of the project.

Initial State

  • A great domain name, but an outdated site with little meaningful customer interaction.
  • Tentative findings from research but no means of validating them without committing to significant investment.
  • High risk of failure or delay to a strategic imperative.

With Good Growth

  • Transformative online offering using existing and bew back end infrastructure.
  • Clear data to test the hypotheses that emerged from research.
  • No impact on Diageo’s technical resources.
  • An alternative, more efficient approach to transformation.

The Outcome

Ultimately, thebar.com served multiple purposes, beyond just being a DTC site. It became a platform for online growth, and a brand-new way to capture the attention of prospective consumers – bringing them into the proposition in a different fashion. This naturally enhanced Diageo’s competitive edge, by offering a new and enhanced personalised experience for their customers.

By working with Good Growth, they were also able to obtain other benefits, by reducing the time, cost and risk normally associated with such large-scale projects, allowing resources to be focused on other challenges.

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