The New Business Ventures team approached us with a challenge: find & test new ways to engage consumers with their brands in this uniquely challenging space. 

Pernod Ricard oversees a portfolio of spirits with a unique challenge in common—a highly-regulated industry that can’t sell DTC and doesn’t own the customer relationship directly. Marketing = brand advertising in this space (and little else). 
 

We developed a number of test-and-learn approaches, starting with Plymouth Gin in a targeted market. Plymouth posed an even more specific challenge in this assignment: How can a 300-year-old brand engage customers directly through modern platforms? 
 

We started by identifying territories that people would want to engage with a brand like Plymouth authentically—something valuable and meaningful to the consumer—connecting with like-minded people, accessing new experiences—and developed a number of concepts that could launch in market as test-and-learn, with a number of easy-to-measure metrics. The goal was to prototype—and learn—and prototype again (and engage people in some fun stuff along the way). 

We developed and tested two SMS-based games, with the goal being not to capture contact info for mailing lists, but to get people to engage in the most valuable aspect of drinking—connecting with other humans, over stories. 
 

We have so much we’d love to share, but this work has yet to launch, so we can only share some strategic thinking (we hope to share more of the actual experience and results soon).