Drizly Opens The Tap On Data

The spirits industry in the U.S. is big business — topping $210 billion last year and growing. The ad spend behind getting people to pick one brand over another is even bigger. But, as Drizly co-founder and COO Justin Robinson told Karen Webster in a recent conversation, most brands selling alcohol in the corner liquor store don’t have access to good data — and maybe any data — about purchasing patterns. Like most brands that sell products in a retail store, brands know what was sold, but nothing about the person buying it, what they bought with it, and more important — why they might have passed them over.

“The [spirts] industry is very constrained when it comes to data availability — there is no universal way for brands or retailers to really understand their consumers and what they want,” Robinson told Webster, noting this problem is doubly apparent when it comes to data and information on the habits of younger and more early-adopting digital consumers.”

But, as the nation’s largest online alcohol marketplace, Drizly has data — lots of it — and of a very particularly useful kind, as brands are trying to get in on (and ahead of) trends in the purchase of alcohol.

“We have been collecting great data as a result of selling beer, wine and spirits online,” Robinson noted, “and for an interesting customer base — a base that everyone wants to know more about, one that skews towards millennials with an average consumer age of 33 — those are the consumers who are starting trends.”

Drizly uses that data themselves, of course — to refine their offerings for their customers. But as of today, the firm announced the launch of the Drizly Data Distillery — a new data hub offering aggregated eCommerce data compiled from millions of orders in 70 cities across the U.S. where Drizzly operates.

The service is free for those in the industry, and Robinson says it will help brands fine tune their marketing and strategy. This data, he noted, gives brands a chance to look more closely at developing trends in consumer consumption of wine and spirits — in ways that just wouldn’t be intuitive without data sets as wide-looking as Drizly’s.

The decision to offer the information up publicly, Robinson noted, sprang from how agencies, suppliers, wholesalers were using the site already — basically scraping data to get a sense of what nationwide shelf prices looked like. Robinson noted that it’s difficult for brands to even know how their products are priced in stores across the country. Just this data alone, he said, is invaluable for brands to better understand about not just about what products consumers are buying, but what price points are motivating them to pick one retailer over another for a particular brand.

Or what brands have the highest conversion rates.

Or what brands have the highest conversion rates when consumers look at them — but that don’t get looked at as widely as they should, considering their high conversion rate.

As for surprising data already up for grabs?  Beer seems to have fallen on hard times.

“Both male and female customers have been shifting their spend away from beer really heavily into spirits and a little bit  into wine. And this shift is aggressively happening — and has been for some time.”

Some beer is doing well — local craft beers, in specific.

“All of the craft beer that is bought — about 50 percent of it is made within the state where it was bought. These large national craft brands are less appealing to consumers than the local craft brands, and that is a trend that is going to continue to go on.”

How else will the face of alcohol consumption in the U.S. among the young and the trendy change?  Stay tuned — we’ll keep you posted with data as it drizzles in.