Johnnie Walker is the world’s number one Blended Scotch Whisky brand by volume, sitting in a commanding position in many markets. Yet with this position comes the age-old dilemma, how to stay relevant to younger drinkers and recruit new consumers into its stable of products.

The Johnnie Walker Global Brand Team approached us to design and produce a mobile app that would allow Johnnie Walker to unlock new opportunities to engage with consumers and drive sales across multiple channels globally.

In particular, the team sought to grow Johnnie Walker’s share of the ‘gifting’ occasion, by giving consumers a compelling reason to choose the product as a gift in an increasingly crowded and competitive Scotch category.

Tapping into the macro trend of personalisation, the goal was to create a flexible and scalable platform that would allow people to use their own photos to create custom Johnnie Walker labels on the spot.

Starting with a pilot roll-out in mid-2016, Johnnie Walker Label Studio was first tested in the travel retail, on and off-premise channels in selected markets in Asia and Europe. The subsequent measurement and evaluation process allowed us to streamline and improve the app for the global scale launch in late 2016.

To date, it has been rolled out in over 40 countries including key global cities (e.g. London, New York, Berlin) and strategic emerging markets (e.g. South Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America).

The flexibility of the platform has seen it executed in wedding banquets, whisky festivals, shopping malls, nightclubs and supermarkets. While consumers create their labels and securely send them to a cloud server, retail staff are given a trade-specific login that allows them to retrieve and print off the labels locally. The app's creative content is regularly refreshed in line with Johnnie Walker's key brand campaigns.