With the Year-End Season approaching fast, many wines and spirits brands should now putting the finishing touches to their 2020 Gift Packs. Call them “Individual Gift Boxes”, “Secondary Packs”, “Limited Editions” or whatever your company jargon suggests, one thing is sure: the 2020 X-Mas Season has to make up for a weak year due to Covid 19, and every gift packs will need to contribute to this effort. So, will you run the “same procedure than last year”, or will you adopt a fresh look on gifting ? Read here the Principles we have developed at Brand Reveal for successful Gifting.
1- Gift Packs are Brand Assets Amplifiers : Brand Assets are non brand name elements, (colours, logos, characters and font that can trigger the brand for category buyers). Consider gift packs (all that extra printing surface!) as a way to show what the bottle on its own cannot always do. Expand on selected brand assets to reinforce recognition or push some of your image core elements. Is your brand about masculinity and style ? How about a gift pack in a black and stylish livery… Given their limited life span, Gift Packs give permission to exaggerate some design traits that would other wise be tiring in the long run.
2- Gift Packs are Active Recruiters: forget about “Loyalty to the few”. There is solid evidence that additional purchases from a large base of disloyal users far offsets repeat purchases from a small base of “loyalists”. And since gift packs are produced at scale, this is an excellent tool to reach desired consumers socio demographic segments. In a previous life, we noticed that 1 out of 5 gift pack buyers came from competition, so we managed to consolidate a base AND recruit new consumers (and generate net additional volume).
3- Gift Packs are a Media : one of the questions facing Gift Packs is “how much and how often”. If Gift Packs carry a brand message, this tool can be viewed as a communication vector. So, understanding the product stock diffusion and rotation is key to achieve visibility (and avoid big unsold stocks of Xmas packs in Spring). And if Gift Packs are seen as a media, why not include them as part of a media plan that will gradually increase awareness in the run up of the (e.g.9 year end, with brand communications in November ?
4- Gift packs are a lens to uncover consumer insights. “Gifting” means there is a giver and a receiver. Understanding “who-gives-what-to-who-when-and-why” is a fundamental part of a good gift strategy. For instance, gifts among socially distant people (e.g. business), imply a social position risk by the giver if the gift is perceived as cheap. Therefore the design of a gift will have to express Premiumness to reassure the giver and trigger his / her purchase. Or when women buy spirits for their partner, it has been observed that they can favour smaller bottle sizes to express the preciousness of their relation. Last but not least, the giver can be … the receiver, and in this times of hardships, a little indulgence never hurts…
5- Gift Packs: an opportunity for the Digital Channel : the C19 situation has accelerated the rise of Digital Channels as a distribution mode for Wines and Spirits. Whilst online channels have different degrees of developments , shoppers are shoppers, online or off. So, if portfolios of ongoing SKU’s need to be organised, by channels, including online, then why not consider Gifting with the additional benefits such as personalisation ?
6- Gift Packs can be a good test run to reduce environmental impact. Every marketer needs to understand the Environmental impact of his / her brand. As Gift programs are often driven by Marketing, the limited nature of a Gift production is a good opportunity for marketers to understand dry goods supply modes and to engage in a fruitful dialog with their production team. This can create invaluable experience to review packaging requirements for the on-going SKU’s. A few years ago, we banned plastic from all gift packs, because we found they gave a cheap feel. And because plastic is hard to recycle. So, do take Gift Packs as a learning base for the on going range.
With sales often skewed in the last quarter, Gift Pack volumes can represent up to one out of three packs sold annually for a brand. This is huge, considering the additional effort to reinvent a new range every year, for a temporary “facelift” that will be forgotten by all on January 1st. To make things worse, brands seldom manage to increase their selling price, thus having to absorb the additional pack cost and erode margins.