Defining a spirits brand’s role with Gen Z
Before a brand can promise anything, it has to know which moments it already belongs in. A spirits company wanted to know what one of its brands could credibly stand for with young adult drinkers, so we ran digital ethnography in seven markets.
- Client
- Spirits company
- Industry
- Spirits
- Markets
- Seven markets in the Americas, Europe and Asia
- Kind of work
- Brand growth
- Our role
- Digital ethnography and positioning territories with young adult drinkers in seven markets
The question
Before any positioning could be written, the team wanted to understand the drinking moments that matter to young adult drinkers, in their own words.
It also wanted to know where the brand stood in those moments, market by market, and which promises it had earned the right to make.
Our approach
We ran digital ethnography in seven markets with young adults of legal drinking age, so the evidence came from real occasions in their own lives.
Each person kept a diary of recent drinking occasions and sorted brands from close to rejected.
Each also wrote an unprompted love letter to the drink brand that mattered to them. With no positioning statement to lead them, people said in their own words which brands belong in which moments.
We built the evidence into positioning territories, each a distinct promise the brand could make, with the evidence behind it, its tensions and its competitive risk.
What the team came away with
Brand leadership had a strategic brief built on the evidence from all seven markets.
Alongside it came positioning territories, each traced back to what people wrote in their diaries and letters, and each written as a hypothesis the brand could test.
Who we heard from
Young adult drinkers of legal drinking age in seven markets, through digital ethnography
Related work
View brand growth case studies- What we do
- Strategic research
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