How companies can best use data insights and AI to reach more consumers

As competition in the alcohol industry increases, brands are taking an increased approach to create a prominent digital front. 

As a superstar with more than 25 years in the digital marketing field, Kate Whitney, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Treasury Wine Estates, explores the top long-term strategies she's utilising to explore opportunities in the global wine industry. In an industry that relies heavily on consumer insights find out how she's helping premium and luxury brands under the Treasury Wine Estates umbrella connect with their consumers and increase revenue opportunities and D2C sales with the power of AI and data.

1. With 25 years’ experience in consumer marketing and digital transformation, what’s your long-term global strategy to grow some of the best-known brands in wine across key global markets?

I’ve maintained a position for the last decade or so that a brand or company doesn’t really benefit from having a distinct ‘digital strategy’, which might sound bizarre given the roles I’ve held. But to explain that theory, truly powerful global brands will continue to have distribution, pricing and marketing strategies as they always have, and these strategies are now simply enabled by digital technology, which is where the advantage lies.

Smart use of digital technology to launch or lift a brand, with focussed applications in must-win markets is where I’ve seen the best results. Broadly speaking, the places that digital plays a key role in providing that advantage of speed, accuracy and connectivity are across media, channel mix optimisation, product distribution, insights and analytics, promotional support, new product development, and so on. Those are not technology buzzwords either, those have been part of a brand’s playbook for over 100 years!

2. How are you and the TWE team driving towards gaining a meaningful piece of consumer attention, to get closer to the consumer than a typical winemaker or distributor would ever get?

TWE’s advantage lies in our global portfolio, and the access to credible insights across that diverse audience of consumers is the key. If you take Penfolds as a shining example of a global luxury icon brand, and our ongoing mission to connect with that consumer. The Penfolds team have been obsessed with unlocking not just the existing consumer, the role there is to protect and nurture that segment ongoing.

The harder challenge is to gain the attention of the ‘New Luxurian’, as we’ve described them. In the wine category, brands don’t typically have access to deep consumer insights or even a 1:1 digital relationship as this group is notoriously shy, so we have to think differently. We elevated our search from the luxury wine consumer to the luxury consumer worldwide, and thought about what motivates that audience in all aspects of their spending, socialising and media consumption.

Gaining the attention of that audience isn’t about creating memorable advertising, we have trained ourselves to show up differently, unexpectedly, and trigger that elusive audience to re-evaluate the role Penfolds can play in their lives as a symbol of what luxury means to them – a great example of this is Penfolds House.

3. How is digital/data helping to optimise the revenue opportunities on the table for TWE?

TWE has been very busy for the last few years building our data and analytics muscle in house. We have three core deliverables against that program of work:

1. To build the home in which to safely ingest, model and store our most critical asset – which is the data;
2. We have a team dedicated to uplifting TWE’s internal capability in accessing and analysing that data as a self-serviced model as our end game;
3. We have another team obsessed with the governance piece which sits between the two.

With that infrastructure, we are able to apply an enterprise-wide mindset shift to use data in all decision making, because we have a more trusted, more accessible, anonymised data set than we’ve ever had before. The advantage of having an in-house Data and Analytics team is that the broader TWE commercial, supply and marketing teams are now able to validate revenue opportunities immediately, using data to prioritise and act on those which offer the most value.

If you think about the spectrum of where that data is being used, it’s about our viticultural footprint, climate, route to market, distributor and retailer performance, and of course consumer mindset. At every part of our vertical, there is a data set available to help us examine the opportunity before we go ahead.

4. What are some unexpected benefits of working with AI and how do you see AI progressing in future?

AI opens up a world of opportunities for us, particularly in the agricultural space. There's a lot of potential for AI to progress our sustainability efforts including reducing water wastage.

We have a partnership with Australian startup, The Yield, which uses more than 20 years of our crop insights to generate precise future weather forecasts for harvest and yield. This approach enables us to respond to the impacts of climate change and implement mitigation plans, ensuring quality is not compromised.

5. What do you think are some of the trends in wine e-commerce and how can wineries increase their DTC sales? What tools can they use to connect with the consumers?

Every market is different when it comes to selling direct to consumers from the brand’s home, or the brand’s online store. In Australia, consumers have been slower to take up online shopping when it comes to wine, however this is an area of opportunity for us.

I’ve seen success with brands who have significant enough range, that the online experience is superior to what can be offered at retail, and for that reason they can retain an online shopper through the customer’s lifetime, but for brands with limited SKUs, it’s very tough to keep that consumer coming back when the category offers so much more at a retail or e-tail shelf.

In the US however, the Wine Club market is strong, and we have an amazing team at Treasury Americas using a full digital playbook against our priority brands over there to capture, convert and retain those consumers on a subscription model which is where the convenience and personalisation model comes into its own.

6. How is TWE leveraging advanced data integration and analytics tools to unify customer data from various touchpoints, allowing you to gain actionable insights?

TWE has a long history of understanding the wine consumer in order to continually launch and grow brands that consumers truly love. How do we do that? We do that through three core data sets – scan data of course tells us what’s selling where; qualitative studies give us deeper understanding of what the consumer is thinking and feeling relative to our brands and category, and lastly the anonymised big data sets we use, eg. Our own DTC transactional data, social media, trends reports and even media consumption all aid in presenting leadership with a true view of our consumers across the portfolio.

Some markets offer a richness in all three, some markets we have to plug the gaps a little, or go without, but at TWE we push ourselves pretty hard to have all three actionable data analysed before we make significant investment decisions.

7. How important is the human component is in the services you offer?

How can you execute strategies that include online and offline initiatives? a. The human component is everything! In our obsession with consumers at TWE, we start there. Our brands operate on knowledge that the consumer operates in an online and offline environment, so we must too. Some brands and markets lend themselves to activating around the on-shelf moment at retail, and some will operate at a higher level and introduce themselves to a new consumer at trial, at events or a cellar door, for example.

We take great care to ensure that regardless of where you meet a TWE brand, be it for the first time or the fiftieth time, the brand experience is consistent, and the product quality continues to match, if not exceed, your expectations. If we get those two things right, we have successfully put the consumer at the centre of our attention.

8. How can eCommerce wineries better connect with their target audience and innovate?

We have had great success building brands from what we’d call virtual wineries. Those brands that don’t have the winemaker, big barrels and cellar door location to bring them to life. We do that by powering those brands just as you would a new challenger consumer brand to life: the brand starts with a well-told and easily understood story, and critically, a USP that will solve a consumer’s problem.

We show up during that pain point in a consumer’s life, and we are relevant, motivating, differentiated and accessible. We have mastery in experiential, social and digital touchpoints to drive engagement, and we don’t over-invest in the wrong channel or consumer by using proven performance marketing models and analytics.

We partner with people and teams that match that brand’s values, and will accelerate growth, and anchor the brand for a long time. The best example I can give you of this is 19 Crimes, the single most successful innovation in wine in the last decade, globally.

9. You are speaking at next month’s Digital Food & Beverage event. Can you share what the audience can expect to hear from you and what excites you about this event?

I am so excited to speak at the event in Singapore next month, the line up is truly global, and I’ll be able to meet so many colleagues from brands I’ve admired for a long time, who have been on a similar journey and are using technology in ways that we are also investigating at TWE. It’ll be a terrific networking event!

I’ll be covering a lot of what’s brought me to TWE at this stage of my career. I see my role as leading and supporting a relationship between the commercial pressures of the wine category, and the opportunity that Digital, Data and technology can enable for our businesses to continue to thrive. These are the very best times to be in a consumer product category, if you know which questions to answer, where to look, and when to act!

Join Kate Whitney at One Farrer Hotel, Singapore, on 27th February 2024, 3:05PM on "Case Study: Driving an intelligent action at an enterprise scale – How to use customer journey mapping to improve your customer satisfaction, remove friction, and increase revenue". Find out more here!