This week our global founder, Crawford Hollingworth presented as part of a duo act with Sheila Cunningham, global head of planning (Baileys) at Diageo as part of the MRS Impact week.
The session looked at how to deliver unexpected commercial innovation - How are global brands using insights from a range of sources to challenge audience thinking and behaviour? Are there new ways of looking at your brand to find innovative ways to drive purchasing and engagement, moving beyond barriers such as seasonality and generations of entrenched behaviour?
Sheila and Crawford told the story of how Baileys connected brand love with new occasions. Although Baileys is a much loved drink, it was trapped in the declining cream liqueur segment. So the team wanted a new strategic vision to connect Baileys to treat occasions to broaden the possibilities for consumption. We needed to identify if possible and how..
Our research scoped out four key treating occasions across different contexts and with different levels of permission. We identified how to best connect the brand with these occasions – leveraging the language, triggers and contexts associated with each which fed into the campaign ‘Don’t mind if I Bailey’s’. Since roll out global decline has been reversed. Baileys is showing growth at around 7 % globally!
The talk has been nominated for Best Presentation for the MRS Annual Conference Awards 2018 together with 3 other finalists!
The session was chaired by Richard Ellwood, head of audience strategy EMEA and UK at Disney with two more presentations completing the session:
- one from Scott Morrison, co-founder of ThinkSprint and Zoe Ruffels, vice president, Consumer and market intelligence at Samsung Electronics Europe; and
- a second from Sabine Stork, founding partner, Thinktank and Claire Sayles, business development manager, hydrogen at Shell New Energies.