Marketing campaigns can only be as agile as the data behind them.
Background
United Spirits Limited is an Indian subsidiary of British multinational alcoholic beverage company Diageo. As the second largest alcohol manufacturer in the world by volume, USL has grown to be a multinational corporation itself. Although, USL’s headquarters remain in Bangalore, the company manufactures over 140 brands and exports hundreds of millions of cases to over 37 countries.
Favorite brands include the McDowell brand, paying homage to Angus McDowell ,the Scot who founded the company as McDowell & Company in 1826, to cater to the needs of the British officials stationed in India. The McDowell brand is one of the largest liquor brands in India and brings in millions of dollars in annual revenue.
Insight
In a report by the consultancy firm KPMG and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), FCMG, Alcohol & Tobacco products were found to account for 65% of bogus goods sold in 2014. According to the International Center for Alcohol Policies, as much as 30% of alcohol consumed worldwide is illicit.
In many cases, the percentage of people who can tell the difference is as low as 5%. Brand encroachers often buy used packaging of the original products and refill for sale. With anti-counterfeiting measures that are placed on the exterior of the packaging, this goes undetected.
Problem
USL determined that counterfeit operations had penetrated their supply chain for one of their products; McDowell’s No1 Whisky, in the state of Assam. They wanted to drive sales of the original product by embarking on a promotional campaign.
They decided that to drive sales to the maximum, they would start a loyalty program. They needed a system that could manage the campaign for them, collect data, and give them access to this data in real-time.
The Sproxil Solution
Sproxil recommended for USL, a mobile technology based engagement and loyalty solution that would allow them to reward consumers with INR 10 worth of air time per bottle of McDowell No.1 Whisky. To do this, Sproxil implemented a UTC(under the cap) based loyalty campaign. Each bottle was assigned universally unique codes which were printed on the inside of the bottle cap.
Upon opening a bottle, all the customer had to do was to send in an SMS with the unique codes from a mobile number to Sproxil’s designated code service. Each time an SMS was received by Sproxil, they received instant ,free mobile recharges to that number.
Results
During the duration of this campaign, USL was able to identify through the Sproxil platform, 15000 influencers in the geographic area of Assam alone. Also, as a result of the promotion, the brand saw growth in its market share in Assam by 2.5%.
The Future
With access to Sproxil’s data analytics portal, USL could access in real-time, anonymized data about its influencers. From this, their marketing team could deduce information about buying behavior and other buyer patterns. With this data, they could run further engagement and retargeting campaigns that resonated better with their influencers. Even better, they now have along-term channel with which to communicate to them directly
