Smart tech key to boosting sales: Diageo boss

The billboards – strategically placed in European cities – automatically changed to promote Pimm’s when the temperature reached at least 20°C.

“Pimm’s is a little bit like ice-cream,” ​said Diageo president of Europe, Russia and Turkey John Kennedy. He said the technology allowed it to harness temperature changes to boost sales when people are feeling thirsty.

Speaking at IGD’s Big Debate conference on October 18, Kennedy said: “If it gets above 20°C in southern England, then Pimm’s sales go up exponentially. Also, the number of people looking for a pub with an outdoor garden goes up by the same amount. ​

“So we installed ​[devices in] a number of our customer outlets that have a terrace or a garden​ [to see how many spare seats it had at any one time], and programmatic ads, whereby if it hit 20°C it flipped to a Pimm’s ad, and told you which nearby outlets still had seats. It had quite a big impact in terms of sales.”​

Rugby World Cup​

Twitter marketing based around the Rugby World Cup had increased sales too, said Kennedy. The campaigns drew on Twitter conversations to deliver marketing messages.

For example, it searched Rugby World Cup traffic on Twitter last year to find most people were talking about Japan’s decision to go for victory against South Africa in the final minutes – despite risking a loss – instead of simply taking a draw. Diageo subsequently launched a Twitter campaign using the slogan ‘Could have settled but went for history’.

Similarly, Kennedy said it partnered news organisation BuzzFeed to promote its Bailey’s brand on the ‘Proper Tasty’ channel. The channel used 10 second videos to demonstrate innovative cooking recipes using Bailey’s. Kennedy said its brand reached a larger audience than the Great British Bake Off​.

‘Spike on brand equity score’​

“The level of viewership on​ [Proper Tasty],​ and the spike on our brand equity scores was very significant,”​ Kennedy said. “I think actually tracking in real time what data is telling you about what consumers are doing and responding to that is having a big impact on the creativity of our work.”​

Both smart technology and clever social media marketing were giving Diageo an edge in increasingly competitive markets, said Kennedy.

“There has been a dramatic shift over the past three years to a much broader array of digital communications, and the results are very strong,”​ he said. “We can see in terms of the number of consumers we have in our brands across Europe, it’s going up significantly.”​

A social media company set Diageo a challenge of having a one-to-one relationship with every single one of its consumers. Kennedy said: “Now, for a consumer goods company that is a long way off, but I think it’s a good challenge in that we can keep pushing the boundaries of tailoring ​[our products], and technology opens up that opportunity.”​