STRATEGY & DIGITAL An online opportunity
Joe Gosney, director of channel operations, and Andrew Cowen, strategic adviser, at Britvic, respectively, discuss the future of soft drinks – online and offline.
ver the past six months, nobody in the industry can ignore the rise of grocery online shopping. Consumers stuck at home, fearful to enter physical stores, have been switching to e-commerce in record numbers. What is the scale of this in the soft drinks category and, more importantly perhaps, how should we adapt our business model to this ‘new normal’? Firstly, lets look at the scale of change. When Britvic put together their fledgling e-commerce team two years ago, around 8% of the category value sales were ‘online’ – but it was growing fast. We might have expected it would take at least five years to become 20% of category sales, but then Covid-19 came along and in the space of six months, online shopping has surpassed 13% of value sales and continues to grow towards 20% within the next 18 months.
O A new approach
E-commerce wasn’t a ‘new’ channel for Britvic. Like most branded organisations, Britvic had an online presence in pure play operators like Amazon and
Ocado or through an extension of the existing grocery business partnerships across the top five. What hadn’t changed for Britvic was the way in which they approached the online business opportunity. There was some category insight that showed ‘.com shoppers’, as they became known, were more likely to be completing a traditional weekly stock up and, therefore, presented a higher basket spend opportunity. The knowledge and capability to access the corresponding data, which could paint a more specific picture of the shoppers, their purchase habits and the different tools available to get a Britvic brand into their online basket, only existed in a small group of experts. This needed to change and the black box approach was slowing down growth rather than enabling it. Online shopping was soon becoming seen as the future by commercial functions, but also where mystery tools and techniques to win shoppers and grow brands are needed, as well as a place where only the very skilled could succeed. Like a lot of good stories, there is some element of truth to it, but the reality was that the principles of great
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