ENSURE YOUR BRAND’s CHANNEL STRATEGY FITS WITH EVOLVING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
Is Your Marketing Plan Designed to Connect with Consumers in 2026?
There have been a lot of market and consumer changes over the past 2 years. Are you keeping up? Have you adjusted your strategy to respond to these changes? The modern buyer is strategic, intentional, and well-researched. A majority of consumers extensively research products or services across several online sources before purchasing. What does this mean for beverage companies? You need to ensure that your brand information can be found, it is updated and it is on a variety of platforms. Furthermore, your content must be in an easy-to-digest format of different lengths so that consumers can “snack” or dive deeply into your brand and product information depending on their interest level and time available.
Consumers today are also flooded with choices and an overwhelming amount of information about each product choice so make your content clear, relevant and expandable with a clear path to purchase. Because more and more research happens via AI, you need to make sure that your content is geared toward how this technology works vs the traditional SEO ranking format.
Decision fatigue is real.
Those who make choice and checkout easy will win. Brands must be mindful of the volume of content a consumer is exposed to, both being pushed at them and the content they get while researching a product. Successful brands find a way to effectively compete for consumer attention, confront decision fatigue and ensure their ecommerce solution enables easy purchase experiences.
Today’s beverage consumer is category agnostic.
Another consumer shift is that today’s beverage consumer is category agnostic and will often drink across non-alc, functional and beverage alcohol options depending on the occasion. This means that you need to understand how your product fits into the different occasions and be able to provide content for that. For example, batch recipes for a game day event or home gathering. With your branding, understand that they are choosing what they drink based on how the brand/product fits their personal choices and lifestyle, not just on product attributes and awards.
They are value – not necessarily price, but value, driven.
They are looking for a fair price and are willing to make tradeoffs. These tradeoffs depend on many factors from consumption occasion to brand sustainability making it a more complex decision making process than it used to be. The more you can understand the drivers, the more you can win at the moment of consideration and value assessment.
The current moment requires an updated understanding of how consumer decision making happens and how brands adjust their marketing plans to update their channel strategies across on premise, off premise or ecommerce. Having an integrated strategy across platforms and channels and understanding this multi-source, high volume and protracted consumer decision making landscape is essential for brands hoping to break through to the modern buyer.
In order to do this, you must have your brand imagery and content clear and consistent across all consumer touchpoints. Brands should strengthen digital engagement, while increasing authentic brand positioning and storytelling with a variety of content types and lengths. Ensure you have a quick, medium and longer form brand narrative that can respond to the amount of time or the depth of interest the consumer has.
Brands should also understand that the purchase is just the starting point. The consumer relationship needs to continue through an emphasis on personalization. Continue to engage your consumer through email marketing, specialized offers and the opportunity to provide feedback to your brand. This allows the consumer to feel valued after the transaction and inspires ongoing mindshare.
RETHINK YOUR ON PREMISE ACTIVATION STRATEGY
Historically, the moment of discovery and consumption had been the on-premise. As a result, most brands have exclusively prioritized their marketing activities and budget around the on-premise. But as consumer discovery, consideration and even purchase has moved online, brands need to include more touchpoints into their marketing strategy and provide more education around at home, or non-bartender moderated consumption. In addition, you then need to connect the online awareness and education with offline sampling that solidifies the brand experience in the mind of the consumer and leads to adoption and repeat purchase.
The on-premise experience is still important, it has just changed. It has become a channel for cementing the brand relationship after the consumer has already discovered and felt enough alignment with your brand to want to learn more and try it. Your brand strategy, tactics and budget should reflect this.
OFF PREMISE HAS ALSO EVOLVED
At home consumption will remain strong because of a shift in the way that people socialize. Today’s consumers, especially younger consumers, focus on home entertainment and consumption. They value smaller, intimate groups and are interested in cooking, cocktail making and entertaining. The numbers show that consumers are enjoying beverage alcohol at home across all formats and not just in settings such as a bar or restaurant. A survey by drinks delivery company, Drizly, showed that consumers plan to do a lot of at home consumption, including dinner parties, holiday celebrations, backyard barbecues and gathering around watching sporting events.
As a result, your marketing strategy now needs to drive awareness around home cocktail making, supporting the host, host gifting and other considerations about how the product will be enjoyed at home, not only the bar and restaurant consumption moment. Maximise pricing and promotional pricing to drive trial. Re-allocate budget to inspire easy hosting re-set promotional activity to level up your off premise consumer engagement.
In summary, understand what drives consumer awareness today, meet them at the various points along the decision making process with clear and relevant information to make that decision, meet their current socializing needs at home as well as when they are out and inspire them to become part of your brand through ongoing communication.
Need to innovate in these turbulent times? Contact Us! For more Tariffs and the Beverage Alcohol Industry, the latest news and trends check out our social media.