Marketing attribution for spirits, wine, and beer brands is considerably far behind other businesses. I am a fan of Sudipto Ghosh‘s definition of marketing attribution. The following definition is found this MartechSeries.com article.
“Marketing Attribution is defined as the process of attributing the source and their outcomes in terms of ROI of conversions across multiple campaigns at different customer touch-points. Before getting started with attribution, marketers need to identify these touch points. Each touch point will have its marketing attribution model. These models determine how the organization endorses leads generated from campaign touch points.”
https://martechseries.com/mts-insights/staff-writers/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-marketing-attribution/
Seems fairly clear doesn’t it? In most cases, the spirits, wine, and beer industries have no clue from where their end customer comes.
How do we know this?
The success of any significant spirits, wine, and beer brand is measured by case counts.
While this is an ultimate measure of success in sales terms, it’s not what will soon become the most important metric.
The new metric of success? Customer lifetime value. CLTV is visualized below.
So let’s breakdown marketing attribution and then revisit CLTV.
When you read through the Martech piece shared above, it offers significant insight.
Sutipda Ghosh states this; “The convergence of online marketing, web analytics and AdTech has introduced a new set of challenges for the marketers. In order to find the most relevant “hook” for lead generation, sales and promotional ROI, marketers need to be familiar with the concept of customized marketing attribution.”
When you think of customized marketing attribution and the vital tasks of measuring everything from the first click results from an online campaign to a brand ambassador’s effectiveness, you can begin to understand how challenging it is to measure attribution in the context of the end consumer in the alcohol industry.
E-commerce business models can dial this in quite effectively. Marketing attribution for spirits, wine, and beer brands just hasn’t been prioritized.
For a long time, agencies have done terrific work on creative but crappy work in leading the brands to ownership of their consumers.
Research shows that 60% of marketing dollars aimed at the alcohol consumer go unmeasured. That means they are brand building image oriented ad spends. This includes out of home, print, sponsorships, and point of sale merchandise.
Recent reading of marketing decks show that big brand aggregators and suppliers spend $10 to $15 per head to sponsor an event. The requirements for making the marketing spend are so woefully short of attribution metrics, it’s nearly unbelievable.
Just think about it, a $15 spend per attendee in sponsorship and you have no visibility on who the attendee is, whether or not she bought your product after the event, and no ability to market directly to her after the event.
When strategically planning for marketing attribution, perhaps it would be wise to think of the entire pathway to purchase for your brand.
When is the customer touching your product?
When is the event attendee invited to ask for your brand at a bar or key on-premise account?
How will you coordinate and measure the call-to-action to specific customer?
How will you reward their continual purchase of your product?
If you’re marketing attribution isn’t contributing to sales attribution, you have a problem.
In revisiting customer lifetime value, this is the most important point. If it’s important to you, assess how every part of your spend ultimately builds a relationship with the individuals who drink your product, NOT the entities who sell it. If this isn’t important to you, be prepared to be dominated by the players in your industry who end up building relationships with their customers. They’ll come around to buy your equipment and hire your personnel one day.
When you’re ready to discuss events, activations, and key on-premise partner promotions that afford a new level of transparency and attribution, we’re ready to chat. Reach out to our CEO, Sherman Mohr for a collaboration call.
