ABOUT

Building an ecosystem for e-commerce success.

With e-commerce intensifying and Diageo’s 70% Y/Y growth in digital retail, we’re helping on a cross-brand transformation globally. This includes optimizing customer engagement with flagships like Guinness, Tanqueray, and Johnnie Walker, commerce platforms, digital revenue, and ticketing and tourism.

The Opportunity: Our first step was ensuring an ecosystem of complementary D2C propositions. We audited the category, sized the market, conducted business valuation, established new value propositions, and created actionable journeys seamlessly connecting brand homes and Diageo’s first digitally native brands, The Bar and Malts-dot-com.

The Solution: We are building an active community of users, driving insight from a broader data ecosystem and optimizing the virtual shelf for deeper and more meaningful moments. Our digital design systems, newly launched product pages, and ongoing content strategy prioritize mid-funnel behaviors across content, community and commerce. For malts-dot-com alone, we’ve identified experience optimizations with £185M in incremental revenue potential– a catalyst for the next generation of brand building.

TheBar-dot-com: Content and Commerce.
COVID hit the spirits industry hard. With people no longer being able to catch up at bars, Diageo saw an opportunity to bring them together in a digitally native environment.

We wanted to help them do more than ‘just’ catch up. Through Diageo's portfolio of world-class brands, and an unparalleled network of drinks experts (i.e., "Cocktailists"), we developed connected content and commerce experiences to attract and nurture consumer relationships—from the moment of discovery and inspiration through to the entire purchase journey.

We worked closely with Diageo’s bartenders to identify the key content opportunities and FAQs (as indicated to us via search). We then developed journeys that let people flow between occasion-led content and immersive brand content, reusing everything we could by migrating 85% of the SEO from the previous cocktail directory content on The Bar.

With a deep foundation of data and insight, we used modern experience design principles to foster deeper and more meaningful engagement, loyalty, and sales.

Malts-dot-com: a timely rebrand.
Curiosity and love abound for whisky—but Malts wasn't feeling the love. TheMalts brand was (mostly) designed around an outmoded version of Whisky culture: “Pale, male, and stale.” We helped them pinpoint ways to be more welcoming, relevant, and dialed into younger digital cultures.

The previous branding also didn't lend itself well to business objectives or digital success. Malts needed to be reimagined to inspire more gifting, enable e-commerce, and capitalize on search insights and SEO. Some focal points of our work included:
• Unlocking community — Increasing first-party data collection for long-term engagement and profitability.
• Bolstering Discovery — Using search-optimized content to impact customer acquisition costs (by increasing first-page Google results and organic traffic).
• Looking ahead to content — Creating an ROI model that demonstrates the importance of repeat visitation, which includes maximizing CRM and first-party data opportunities.
• Getting feedback from user testing — Understanding whether or not our creative direction is resonating with people.
• Nailing the basics — Completing a full audit, creating a content hierarchy, and performing test-and-learn.

Cheers to a new beginning.
On Malts-dot-com, we broke with conventional Scotch parlance, favoring a bright, fresh, and modern visual language that would ensure Whisky felt accessible to all. We iterated extensively on our wordmark until we finally reached the perfect marriage of celebratory spirit and beautiful brand elevation. Our fonts allowed for stateliness and a personal touch. Interms of color palette, our hues are native to Scotland itself but still modern.

As we tested our concepts, we knew we were heading in the right direction when we found a correlation between audience engagement and descriptors such as “modern” and “intriguing.” Our respondents likewise said they felt invited to explore further.

This really is a brand that travels. Our Malts branding work was part of a larger website redesign—a site that plays a key role within a broader ecosystem of brands, websites, and even tourism. We also handed over a content strategy that uses Diageo's direct-to-distillery USP, delivering exclusive "hobbyist" content for Whisky aficionados, educational content for new-to-category drinkers, and even travel content for our Whisky tourist segment who want to travel the misty highlands on a distillery tour. All of it is suffused with the look and the soul of our branding.