Reporting from Swissotel in Chicago for the IIR Shopper Insights in Action conference!
I enjoyed listening to Monday’s appropriately high-energy talk from Guy Wootton, senior category insights manager for Red Bull, about how much Red Bull relies on and uses shopper insights. (No Red Bull samples – darn.) I didn’t realize how profitable the energy-drink business is, or how Red Bull dominates it.
Wootton’s presentation made it clear that even brands that rule their markets still recognize the need to find out what’s going on in the store – at least the smart ones do.
There’s certainly a lot at stake, based on the numbers he posted showing the exponential growth that’s forecasted for the energy-drink category, and based on the price premium that Red Bull commands.
In a nutshell, the research has shown that Red Bull has extremely loyal consumers who know what they want and waste no time getting it. Their preferred way to buy Red Bull is the c-store and they like to get in, grab their daily can and get out. (The Red Bull drinker’s purchase time is 28 seconds, compared to 55 seconds for the standard c-store shopper, a 2009 TNS Sorensen study found.) So the company’s focus has been all about speed, Wootton said. It wants to optimize the experience for the routine shopper by helping them locate Red Bull product and the energy-drink category fast and make their purchase fast.
Thus recent work has been on in-store signage and visual cues to help the shopping process. One “phenomenally successful” effort has been the experimenting with horizontal blocking – aligning Red Bull products in a horizontal row to make them more prominent – and also stair-stepping Red Bull products in displays, to show shoppers the full array of sizes available.
While the energy-drink market’s gotten a bit more crowded lately, now that Red Bull has seen the value of gathering shopper insights, I’ll bet it will be able to keep flying ahead of the competition.