Insight & Strategy: Carling

Beer Button
We find out how an ecommerce button is being used to
keep the Carling brand visible in the decision-heavy
world of online retail
September 28, 2016

To make choosing Carling over its competitors easier, the British beer brand has
created an instant buy button. As we recently reported, the Molson Coors brand
worked with agency Hi Mum! Said Dad and five UK supermarkets to give its
customers the ability to order a crate with the press of a button.
The button works in tandem with the Carling Beer Button app, which allows
customers to pick the supermarket theyd like to order from so, when they do
their weekly online shop, the pack of Carling will already be in their basket. We
spoke to Craig Wills, managing director of Hi Mum! Said Dad and lead strategist
on the project, to find out how the brand became an early adopter of this one-touch
button technology.

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Where did the idea of the button come from?

Ultimately, a lot of it came from the declining visibility for beer in online shopping.
With Molson Coors we can analyse purchase patterns very closely, so were always
thinking about how we can make sure people see our products because purchase is
linked to visibility. People who are buying mass market lager or popular lager
will switch between brands and often they are driven to buy one brand based on
visibility, they wont be particularly loyal to any one brand.
And when you go onto online environments, you have less visibility than you would
in a physical aisle, and mobile is even worse than desktop because theres even less
on the screen. That means youve got less opportunity to have that moment where
people see your brand and gravitate towards it just because youre visible, where
theyre making the decision.
Once you get the beer button, which youll get free with a 24-pack, its in your
home so you can add it to your basket whenever you run out. We know that if were
able to take a role in peoples homes then we sort of knock all the competitor
brands out of the frame before theyre even an option because theyve added
Carling to their basket before they even go to do their online shop.
That was one of the aspects, the other was one-touch convenience. One-touch
buttons have become more and more popular, Flic is on the market and Amazon
Dash launched in the UK about a week before we launched this, and for some
brands and retailers its a bit of a threat. For example, if youre a Tesco shopper and

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you might be compelled to go over and buy Amazon groceries because its more
convenient to use a button to stock up on household products so we wanted to
give our customers, in this case I mean the supermarkets, a route to have that onetouch convenience.
What were the business objectives?
Theyre three-fold. Firstly its about offering a new breed of shoppers a way to
discover and buy our brand, by representing it in a digitally advanced way. But
thats not as important as the next, which is about combating the declining
visibility due to to the increase of online shopping. We cant stand out so much in
these environments, so the declining visibility for us means declining sales, so we
wanted to combat that.
Then lastly, its about creating a solution that works with our retail partners so
were not alienating them by using something like Amazon Dash. We needed to
make sure that our customer relationships are still intact while also creating a
convenient solution for shoppers.

If were able to take a role in peoples homes then we sort of knock all the competitor
brands out of the frame before theyre even an option
Craig Wills, Hi Mum! Said Dad
Why was this a better solution than using something like Flic?

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This is something thats pre-programmed, all you need to do once you have the
button is choose the shop of your choice on the corresponding app, whichever shop
youd like, Tesco, Asda, anything, and then you choose what skew youd like. So you
basically say every time I press this button Id like a four pack or a 12-pack and
then you never have to open the app again.
Also, with things like Flic, theres a lot of programming, the user has to know how
to use it, but even if it was pre-programmed theres a couple of barriers to it. Flic
uses Bluetooth as well, but it doesnt have the ability to open an app if its hard
closed in the background, so if we used Flic for this solution, youd need to have the
Carling app running on your phone in the background. And, realistically, were an
FMCG product, youre not going to have our app running all the time, so we needed
a solution that could still complete the transaction without the app running at all.
We looked at wifi as well, Dash is wifi-based but the unit cost is too high. We
wanted to be able to scale it out at a really low cost so we could give it away with
packs, because people will buy Carling based on value add. Say, for example, youre
standing in the aisle, and youve got a choice between Fosters, Carling and
Carlsberg, its not necessarily price that drives the decision, what more commonly
drives the decision is value add. So it could be Now TV vouchers, so 24 hours of
sport access, or it could be a button, and youre more likely to buy that product
because of the value add, even if its two pounds more expensive.
So we know that this will drive sales to start with, and then it will drive incremental
purchase because it increases our visibility.
Do you think that the convenience of this would convince people to choose
Carling, even if they prefer something like Stella Artois?
Yes, I think so. When you look at the audience profile, if you had a total audience of
100, 60 of that 100 would be relatively malleable. So there will be a good amount of
people who like them all or dont have a particularly strong preference, and theyll
make their choices based on value add as well as visibility. If its there, then theyll
see it and make their decision right there on the spot.

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There are a lot of things going on here, initially it was about visibility in the household,
but weve also given Tesco a way to compete with Amazon
Craig Wills, Hi Mum! Said Dad
Did you also think about making the decision making process easier?
Yes, we know that too much choice can make for no actions whatsoever. Its a riches
of choice type of thing, when you get a cognitive overload looking at all of the
options. Its like Netflix, I have Netflix, Sky and Amazon and I never find a movie to
watch, even though Ive probably got 3,000 at my disposal, because theres just way
too much choice.
Just making it easier for users to make a choice, to pick a product they actually do
like, even though they might like a competitor as well, removes the hassle of choice
and makes their life easier.
The fact that this button benefits the retailers and the consumers is
interesting, was that always part of the plan?
Yes, but it wasnt a partnership. We did it based on all the technologies we had at
our disposal, not using the tech teams from any supermarkets. But we definitely
recognised that for Carling those customer relationships are really important,
everywhere we stock, we want to be adding value for our customers, driving more
purchase for our customers, driving more footfall for our customers, because that
means theyll prioritise our brand.

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There are a lot of things going on here, initially it was about visibility in the
household, but weve also given Tesco a way to compete with Amazon, in a weird
roundabout way.
I think it would be really dangerous for Carling, the most sold FMCG brand, to do
something with Amazon and turn our backs on the retailers who make our product
visible to huge amounts of customers every day. So it was conscious in that sense,
we didnt want a solution that alienated the people that stock our products, we
wanted an inclusive solution.
And we didnt want to create a product that drove a choice away from our
consumers, which is why we included as many of the retailers that we could
possibly include. We didnt want a customer who would normally shop at
Sainsburys to start shopping at Tesco because that would alienate the retailers on
that side, and if you flip it over it would alienate the consumer on their side.
We wanted to make sure that the consumers still had the choice of where they buy
the product. And, from a behavioural perspective, trying to get someone to
completely change who they shop with for one product button is completely
impossible. Amazon might have some success over time, but at the moment youre
not going to start doing your shopping with Amazon because theyve got a button
that helps you get your dishwashing powder more quickly, thats too much of a
behavioural shift.
So there are a few layers of rationale behind why we went down that route, though
in some ways it would have been easier to choose a more digital partner, like
Deliveroo or Jinn, and make it one integration in the back end, but we went for
multiple integrations for that reason.
We thought it was very clever that there were multiple integrations.
From a consumer perspective absolutely, on the tech side, some of the more clever
aspects are that it can wake up the app from the background which no other button
could do at least when we looked around. That and the unit cost, trying to get an
Internet of Things device down to such a low unit cost, and were talking about a
pound, was a massive challenge.

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We would have been able to get this product out six months ago if there hadnt been
such an emphasis on making sure that it didnt turn into a PR stunt
Craig Wills, Hi Mum! Said Dad
What research did you do in the run up to making the button?
Theres a lot of research around how making decisions easier and making products
more visible are the two things that drive purchase at the point of sale. And certain
product virtues like value add make a difference as well.
Theres a lot of thinking around driving choice, but I dont think this is going to
drive somebody who is really into their craft beers to go back to a more popular
lager. For those who have it in their choice spectrum, however, its likely with this
well be able to get more share from those individuals.
Did you have a brief?
Yes, but it wasnt to make a button, it was about considering more modern ways to
shop online more connected ways to shop. A lot of what were doing with Carling
is about putting the product into peoples consideration. We know most of the time
decisions dont get made until they have to be made, so people arent walking into
the shop, or the online channel, with their minds made up. There are a percentage
that do, but the greater percentage dont, so we were looking at how we could use
technology to drive consideration of the product by making the product more
visible.

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From the very beginning we had an ambition to use new technology, so it would be
differentiating as well. For this type of thing, being a first mover is really important
because when every brand jumps on the band wagon, and theres a button for every
single thing, it might become inundating for consumers. Then people will start
being more selective again, and wed be back at the same challenge we had initially.
So we wanted to go out there and do something innovative at the right time.
How long did it take?
Quite a while actually, it must have been at least 12 months. We tried a whole
range of technologies and that was a really interesting process, testing all the pros
and cons of various options. It started off as a wifi button, but we couldnt get the
unit cost down to a reasonable price. It was a long process, with a lot of technical
discovery. We needed to figure out how to get integrations with all the retailers,
and that was a long and complicated part.
You did quite a lot of research, was there anything that stuck out for you?
We had a lot of research findings from the iPint app. iPint, which has now been
evolved to Carling Tap, has an internal platform that gives users vouchers and
value add at the point of purchase, so we have huge amounts of data around how
people shop for our products. We know what things are compelling and
whereabouts shopping activity is taking place.
So a lot of the insight comes from the data coming out of the products that weve
built. And that gives us a competitive advantage when were thinking about what
would work and what the corresponding app experience would need to be for it to
be effective.
Working alongside the customer team at Molson Coors, Sean Ferguson in
particular, was really beneficial. Sean really knows his customers, he knows how
people shop and what theyre thinking from the research hes done talking to and
observing actual users and that insight meant we had creative breakthroughs
early on.
Are they in peoples houses yet? Are they going to be?
They are a real thing; we would have been able to get this product out six months
ago if there hadnt been such an emphasis on making sure that it didnt turn into a

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PR stunt. It needed to be a truly scalable thing. There have been lots of examples of
people talking about buttons that just disappear because they turn out to not be a
reality. But this is already in place, we are manufacturing loads of them. I think the
target is a million, and they will go on packs that are sold in the supermarket. Im
not sure about timing though, weve already got a few thousand that are being sent
out to influencers and that is going to be followed up with a big release.

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