Global VP – Digital Marketing, eCommerce & Advanced Analytics | 2018 – 2020
Molson Coors, a multinational beverage company dating back to 1786, ranks in the top 5 largest beer companies in the world and owns 100+ brands across the globe. Ticker symbol TAP (2019 net sales of $10.8B).
THE GOAL
As a way to drive market share, acquire a “younger” demographic and improve customer retention, in 2018 Molson Coors decided to start investing heavily in digital and enable new, moderns ways to sell, service and market to end consumers and business customers.
In the US, market share declines, combined with a loyal “baby boomer” consumer group, highlighted the need to double-down on acquiring new, millennial aged consumers.
Across all global regions, Marketing teams were struggling to acquire new customers fast enough, while experiencing market share and sales declines.
In Europe and Canada, the existing Tele Sales model for supporting 1000’s of restaurants, bars and convenience stores had become too expensive and slow to scale. And sales reps were giving away product margin to win accounts, instead of selling value.
THE US SOLUTION
- Media ROI Optimization – Led efforts to migrate digital marketing methods to programmatic, data-driven, audience focused strategies.
- Data Driven Marketing – Led consumer data strategy and process changes to use consumer insights to shape media buying strategies. Worked closely with ad agencies and internal brand teams to pilot and roll-out new media buying plans and budgets. Led Data Management Platform (DMP) activation and best practices. Introduced new audience creation strategies based on a combination of dozens of 3rd party data sources (Nielsen, IRi, Foursquare and Kantar). Introduced advanced “Test & Learn” capabilities to answer key marketing questions such as, “Which creative and promotions drive incremental customers?” , “When should I send campaigns and to which segments?”, “How are my digital ads impacting sales?”
- B2B2C & Digital Shelf – Led highly collaborative B2B2C efforts with major retailers, such as Walmart, Kroger and Amazon, to drive ecommerce sales across retail sites. Drove both commercial and technical initiatives to align product assortment, inventory optimization, product information management and syndication, retailer SEO, operations and fulfillment, as well as analytics and insights between Molson Coors and respective retail partners. Led digital team responsible for rolling out digital boot-camps to hundreds of national retailer reps. Net results from B2B2C showed incremental online sales, increased market share in retailer’s offline channels and larger basket sizes for retailers both online and offline. A significant and strategic win-win.
- B2B eCommerce & Customer 360 – Captured $30M+ in incremental top-line growth delivering B2B/Marketplace and digital sales force automation (SFA) programs. Secured major B2B wins with customers, raising sales from online accounts +10% and lifting net promoter scores (NPSs) and total accounts payable (TAP) within a single-year.
- DTC eCommerce – Led 1st DTC sites for alcohol in the US. Strategy less about incremental sales, more about collecting 1st party consumer data, building awareness of buying beer online and strengthening retailer partnerships, who handle fulfillment.
- Community Engagement – Revamped company wide social media strategy and operations. Rolled out common social media management tools, performance KPIs and improvement processes.
- Transformation – Led efforts for company-wide digital marketing up-skilling and online training courses.
THE US RESULTS
- 20% improvement in Return On Ad Spend, against a $250M global digital budget
- Significant reduction of media impression oversaturation, adding to ROAS
- 1st party data from DTC driving in-store sales and quality of audiences targeting
THE EUROPE & CANADA SOLUTION
- Strategy – Led holistic Customer360 strategy, an integrated Sales, Service and Support capability, designed to align all commercial teams and ultimately to drive incremental sales volume.
- Conversion – Oversaw eCommerce site redesigns, added a mobile experience, improved supply chain integrations and promise dates. Created growth strategy roadmap to add personalization and expand on marketplace capabilities.
- Insights – Introduced global KPI playbook and universal reporting dashboards via Tableau.
- Innovation – Supported IoT “Smart Tap” initiative, providing insights to 1000’s of accounts on proactive maintenance steps to reduce cost-to-serve expenses by $40M in UK annually.
THE EUROPE & CANADA RESULTS
- YOY sales increase of +20% per account that started buying online
- eCommerce sales lift of +$30M, with 15% incremental
- YOY Tele Sales cost reduction of 20%
- Targeting +50% of total sales online by 2022