How Southern Glazer's Bridges the BevAlc Data Gap
The beverage alcohol (BevAlc) industry faces a unique set of challenges compared to other consumer goods categories, including business fragmentation and complex routes to market. Until recently, there wasn't much in the way of a direct path to data between suppliers, wholesalers and customers, according to Alan Wizemann, chief digital officer for Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits.
As a keynote speaker at the Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Tech Summit, held Oct. 28–29 in Chicago, Wizemann took attendees behind the scenes of how today’s BevAlc network came to be — from the “noble experiment” known as Prohibition to the post-repeal creation of the three-tier system designed to regulate product quality and taxation.
That siloed network has typically kept suppliers blind to consumer behavior trends. For this reason, Southern Glazer's transformed its entire organization to help build connectivity to that data so that consumers could better understand the value proposition of a brand.
"When they're drinking, what they're drinking … all that information is coming from the distributor tier. It's not coming from the suppliers or advertising campaigns," said Wizemann.
Backed By Digitally Enabled Infrastructure
An Overview of the Southern Glazer's Data Cycle
- SGWS collects more than 188 million data points, including 2.8 million images, to power three-tiered collaboration.
- The company aggregates and syndicates content created by suppliers, powering the data and visual content for BevAlc sales on the top 10 e-commerce sites, including Walmart.
- The company is beginning to identify retailers that can use marketing assets to move beyond simple demographics to lifestyle- and interest-based campaigns.
Southern Glazer's began by building a dedicated digital organization armed with granular consumer insights that provide suppliers and retailers with actionable, revenue-driving insights and tools.
"To make this possible, we had to radically reorganize the company," said Wizemann. "We built a digital organization to unlock all this two years ago, so we could have everything in one space: order management; outside sales and guided sales; inside sales and customer support; admin planning and management tools, etc."
As part of this, the company launched a B2B internet sales platform called Proof that allows suppliers and retailers to conduct business digitally and collects important transaction and behavioral data. Additionally, the company created an AI-native field sales companion that provides sales reps with insights such as products with a higher likelihood of being ordered.
Learn more: How Southern Glazer’s is elevating Proof for "hands-free commerce"
Additionally, it uses generative AI capabilities to translate lifestyle trends into customer value in dollar amounts, such as how a locally attended sporting event might inform a campaign that drives revenue.
These systems are supported by a pool of data with insights pulled from:
- Image recognition technology within retail execution efforts to pinpoint inventory gaps on shelf and identify what's on delivery vehicles.
- POS and inventory systems that identify the time of consumption.
"We knew that if we could get closer to the consumer, we could get more information from suppliers into the hands of customers to help grow their businesses," said Wizemann.
