Streamlining and centralising brand-related product websites
Anheuser-Busch is the undisputed leader of the US beer industry and one of America’s most iconic companies. For generations, beer drinkers have enjoyed their great-tasting brews and the Anheuser-Busch portfolio includes some of the world’s most recognisable beer brands: Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob ULTRA and Stella Artois. Meanwhile, the company’s 12 regional craft partners provide drinkers with a choice of delicious craft beers. Anheuser-Busch soon realised that running different web shops for each of their brands was too costly and complicated and not in the interest of consumers. “We were not thinking consumer first,” said John Faviano, the Director of Demand Management and Integrated Marketing Technology for North America at Anheuser-Busch.
“We originally launched a Bud Light shop, an Anheuser-Busch gift shop, a Michelob ULTRA shop, but we were completely overspending from an operational perspective and there was no consistency,” he added. “There was a lot of duplication of work. Shops were going up, shops were coming down.” Each brand store used a different commerce solution, which was expensive, inconsistent, slow and hard to manage. So Anheuser-Busch relaunched their shops using Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Commerce Cloud, allowing them to control multiple branded shops on one dashboard.
Shop the experience
“By working with the marketing agency MRM/McCann to implement Magento (part of Adobe Commerce Cloud), we made sure it was integrated into AEM. We built an experience-first approach with shopping hotspots, where customers can add products directly to their basket as they engage with the product and promotional content on the site.” Lifestyle images of models wearing cool Bud Light pullover and tees soon became clickable and shoppable. This simplified shopping experience attracted those ‘impulse buy’ customers and was repeatable across all brands, said Faviano.
The early results were exciting: In a two-month period, Anheuser-Busch accomplished more than 25 per cent of their annual Bud Light online apparel and merchandise total sales, proving that impulse buying patterns work for single products like pullover and beer koozies. Separately, they offer special edition chalices that shoppers can’t find on third-party sites and promoted their NFL koozies with a geo-specific campaign that offered users from New York a Jets Koozie and users from Kansas City specially-branded Kansas City Chiefs Bud cans. “For us, apparel and merchandise play a very critical role in our branding promotion,” explained Faviano. “So we performed these small tests that have been successful or ‘failed forward to improve the way we work.’”