Harnessing consumer insight to drive decision-making at Moët Hennessy

Q&A with the 2024 Global Marketing Research Project award winner, Redblue Research

Editor’s note: Redblue Research is the winner of the 2024 Global Marketing Research Project award, a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. The award winners were announced during a virtual celebration on November 19, 2024. To learn more about the awards, visit https://www.quirksawards.com/.

Moët Hennessy, the wine and spirit division of LVMH, is a luxury wine and spirit manufacturer. The company wanted to drive consumer insight as the foundation of decision-making company wide.   

Redblue, a market research firm, joined Moët Hennessy in this endeavor, creating the “Strategic Understanding Study.” This study is comprised of a globally consistent consumer framework that quantifies premium alcohol consumption at brand and category levels. Because of this study, Moët Hennessy teams can reliably identify, quantify and develop growth opportunities. 

Within the project nomination, the submitter said the journey was rewarding for both organizations. 

“Creating this powerful and sophisticated insights tool on such a vast scale, balancing global consistency with local nuance and successfully introducing the usage of this across the whole business is an enormous, ongoing and hugely rewarding journey for both businesses,” the nominator said.

I sat down with Katie Shade, director at Redblue, to learn more about the study. 

Describe the “Strategic Understanding Study.” 

The “Strategic Understanding Study” (SUS) covers the who, what, when, where, why and how of premium+ alcohol consumption. The delivery is designed to enable hundreds of Moët Hennessy employees around the world to become self-sufficient in identifying and exploring opportunities for growth.  

The SUS is a globally consistent occasion and consumer framework, quantifying premium+ alcohol consumption at a brand and category level and providing teams with the tools they need to reliably identify, quantify and develop brand growth opportunities. 

The program has reached 110,000 survey respondents globally and has underpinned brand planning in over 40 countries and counting. The survey coverage is vast, including 20+ different alcohol categories built from over 1,000 brands. The SUS is a complex tool. To ensure it is truly adopted by the broader organization, and drives successful decision-making, it was delivered in a simple way. Moët Hennessy and Redblue worked closely in partnership with each other, bringing together the strengths of both parties. 

A big success is in how the program has managed to balance: 

• Global consistency vs. local nuance.  
• The breadth of category coverage vs the depth of individual brand variants. 
• The complexity of the sector and in turn the methodology vs creating intuitive and accessible outputs for end users who are less familiar with research.  
• Providing tools for self-sufficient brand planning on a large-scale vs. the human support and consultancy to build confidence and competence in this usage. 

What challenges did you encounter while conducting a global study? 

The biggest challenges for SUS were bound up in two main themes; creating a comprehensive and flexible tool that works across a broad portfolio of brands and making this vast and rigorous tool intuitive and accessible for users.  

We had to ensure that alcohol categories were comparable between markets, while also ensuring that local teams were able to dig into specific brands they care about. Furthermore, we had to balance the breadth of category coverage with the depth of individual brand variants. 

To overcome this, we went beyond standard best practices by leveraging local sales data to automatically calculate the proportion of premium+ volume coverage per category. By doing so, we efficiently achieved a representative category view and then strategically hand-pick key brand variants for each market. This dual-layered approach ensures the inclusion of local brands while maintaining global comparability on categories.

We made sure to hit the right balance of support for end-users of the data, as well as rolling it out on a large scale in an efficient manner. We worked closely with local and regional insights leaders to execute the market dives – at times working on up to 13 markets at once. We got to know local nuances affecting each market to more effectively make decisions and suggestions throughout the set-up phase. 

Local and regional leads provided invaluable details to ensure each study was tailored to that market. Standardized delivery was efficient to roll-out, hitting tight deadlines in the lead up to brand planning processes. Video presentations to introduce the outputs in a human way to local teams, follow-up 1:1 sessions with local insights leads and companywide training sessions all contributed to successful delivery to audiences across different markets.  

Providing the tool kit for teams to be self-sufficient in accessing and exploring the data was fundamental to the project but uncovering meaningful insights and demonstrating the power of consumer data via tailored, issue-led storytelling was also key to helping teams get the most from it. 

After launching the self-serve tool kits to markets, we have led insights dives into various categories and brands to uncover and explore opportunities. Data sets ladder together to allow for local, regional or global analysis, making it a truly global tool as well as accessible for deep dives within local teams. 

What is the biggest change resulting from this project?  

Teams across Moët Hennessy make hundreds of decisions using SUS data each year – from informing target audiences, to identifying short- and longer-term occasion opportunities, to exploring potential product developments and positioning. 

The change this work has brought is a culmination of these countless decisions happening across brands and markets around the world; it underpins the decision-making process of the business. 

SUS is an ongoing program of work that is foundational to the way Moët Hennessy approaches brand planning and opportunity identification. 

Beyond this, it is a common framework and language that local and global teams can use to communicate and share ideas, ultimately pulling in the same direction to drive growth among Moët Hennessy’s portfolios.