NIQ Webinar: Innovation for the next era of alcoholic beverages
Our webinar on category blurring was held in partnership with our Platinum Partner NIQ. We're grateful to Tom Graham and Jaye Wee for their valuable insights.
Category blurring describes consumers choosing drinks by occasion, flavour, format and convenience rather than staying loyal to one category. NIQ's shopper data shows this is already shaping the market, with people who buy across more than three categories contributing the most to liquor sales.
Some of the key points from the webinar were:
- Blurring is happening in three connected ways. Consumers move between categories depending on the occasion, products borrow cues from other categories and new formats take categories into new settings.
- The competition is broader than the category. Wine is losing relevance in its core meal occasions and beer's biggest losses are to soft drinks and energy drinks.
- Product innovation is centred on flavour, alcohol content, and carb and sugar content. Most of the growth in lower-alcohol beer has come from shoppers adding it to what they already buy, which keeps them in the category.
- New formats can attract shoppers who hadn't been buying liquor, as well as drawing sales from other categories.
- Growth depends on the category as well as market share, with research showing a third of brand growth is driven at category level. NIQ looks at four levers: new reasons to choose the category, new occasions, new benefits and fewer reasons to leave.
- For businesses reviewing their own category, Jaye suggested three questions to discuss with your teams: whether your category is defined by how the industry sells or how consumers choose, what consumers choose instead when they skip it, and which occasions you might be overlooking.
VIEW RECORDING