Research Live: Distilling data (Chivas)

Pernod Ricard-owned Chivas Brothers launched its Allt-A-Bhainne single malt in 2018. The product uses semiotic codes that aren’t typical of the single malt category, which historically trades on tradition and heritage – in contrast, the Allt-A-Bhainne distillery opened in the 1970s.

As such, Chivas Brothers wanted robust data to help it build confidence internally and secure marketing budget around the launch of the new whisky in the Australian market. Rather than commissioning qualitative research, the company worked with insights agency SKIM to produce a volumetric prediction model aimed at forecasting the brand’s potential success and highlighting marketing priorities.

Published on Research Live, we shared our research journey with Pernod Ricard where they now could predict how many cases would be sold each week for the three years after the launch, by combining the share of preference from the conjoint simulator with the seasonality and distribution effect from the sales-data analysis. They can also now combine output from our simulator with other aspects of the research to illustrate what impact different price choices, distribution and marketing activity could have on sales and positioning.