The Cocktail Discovery Model brilliantly elevated old-fashioned keyword research and taking it from a chore to a business intelligence and business change enabler. By understanding the true “Voice of the Consumer” we are able to create effective engagement opportunities that contribute directly to bottom-line business growth.

Enhancing time-consuming human segmenting with Artificial Intelligence and Data Visualization enabled faster classification and refinement of the data into useable clusters. Integrating ongoing performance and creative engagement data further enhanced the process by isolating content that better matched the actual interest of the consumer, fostering deeper engagement and interest. This created a repeatable process that generated incremental insights as the dataset grew.

The initial data analysis identified over 500 new content opportunities and changes to current assets. Most importantly uncovered the “inspiration triggers” consumers use to discover new drinks for specific occasions, by colour, origination, or even glass types.

These insights have created a significant number of new opportunities for the brand to generate consumer-specific content for not only the website but in social media, how-to videos and the functionality of the cocktail app.

Due to scale, we focused initial efforts on the “Drink Curious” cluster of 53 core cocktail attributes and 107 occasions. The plan was to continue to refine a deeper understanding of these consumer interests and make appropriate content adjustments that established Absolut Vodka as the brand of choice when making these cocktails.

In most cases, there were no brand preferences from the consumer during their quest for the perfect cocktail making it a prime opportunity to connect the brand to the cocktail experience. This helped identify content opportunities in social media, store marketing, search marketing and digital display. By knowing the relative interest in types of cocktails we could present more contextually related ads.

This data-driven innovation fundamentally changed the way the brand thinks about consumers, content that really generates engagement, and creates a sustainable competitive advantage that increases mindshare and ultimately revenue.

This program exceeded established objectives beyond our expectations. Initially visits increased 24% with mobile traffic specifically increasing by 77% with a total increase of 125%.

Consumer experience improved, demonstrated by page views increasing from 1.3 to 3.6 per visit. Page views for “Cocktail Curious” clusters achieved 8.3 with a significant increase in eCRM signups far exceeding the goal of 50%.

An excellent example of business impact is showcased in deeper analysis of the popular phrase “drinks with triple sec.” The optimization analysis identified consumers wanted a list of drinks with this ingredient. The existing content described triple sec and said it was used in popular cocktails. Revising the description to include recognizable cocktail names, interaction went from 1.2% CTR to 16.9% driving an additional 22k visits and a 10x increase in signups. This enhancement was deployed across the entire “drinks with” content portfolio.

The data mining and refinement outlined above enabled consumers to discover new and interesting cocktails but, more importantly, helped reinforce Absolut as the vodka brand to consider when looking for interesting cocktails. The increased signups enable Absolut to retarget this audience multiple times in the context of their initial interests, expanded interests, fostering engagement and brand loyalty.