Anheuser-Busch Companies LLC and Anheuser-Busch InBev have lately needed to see how they will manage some of their financial holdings due to a corn syrup-centric lawsuit from MillerCoors. While that matter is way too young for us to gauge what might happen to the beer bigwigs’ bank accounts, we can confidently look at the returns from their new merch store to predict that they will be hopping glad as 2019 unfolds.
The year has not been short on headlines for the entities, and while many members of the public will focus mainly, or even solely, on the battle with MillerCoors, the beverage providers are not letting that uncertainty stop their monetary motives. Through the online store, they are, as Ad Exchanger reported, ramping up their “cloud commerce capabilities to increase and centralize shopper data.”
Why @AnheuserBusch Is Going Big On Ecommerce, With Or Without The Beer https://t.co/66ziAj9yhh by @JamesHercher
— AdExchanger (@adexchanger) March 25, 2019
As the news source notes, beer sales are always going to top related branded merchandise tallies, but the Anheuser-Busch team is more enthused about “transactional data” and “sales lift visibility,” according to John Faviano, its director of demand management and integrated marketing technology. He informed Ad Exchanger that his employer is using the store to consolidate the previously fragmented e-commerce platforms of its various brands, in hopes of gathering better data and providing better metrics to brand marketers. Sales, it seems, were a secondary concern, but even there, the new store is paying off. First-quarter merchandise sales have already outdistanced all of 2018’s figures.
Because of that and the aspirations that Faviano and the Anheuser-Busch family hold, including the likelihood that the site’s NFL-related goods could bolster research data for the companies’ other sports marketing contracts, we decided to venture to the Shop Beer Gear merch store to scope the merchandise and apparel items. Devoid of any impartiality, we can say that the products offer a commendable amount of diversity and creativity, thus leaving us to wonder why data, rather than dollars, was the primary goal for Anheuser-Busch.
Perhaps, and this is absolutely pure speculation, the company is aiming to go beyond the “impulse buying” that Faviano mentioned to Ad Exhanger, and are striving to conceive of more products to offer. Yes, sweater coolies and “Naturdays” T-shirts will always win favor (kudos on the latter’s name, by the way, Anheuser-Busch), but we are sure that at this very moment, that collected data is doubling as a resource that will very soon reap financial benefits. Thanks to the Ad Exchanger’s mention of two loyalty programs that go into effect this month, we are not totally playing Nostradamus, but, nonetheless, we are excited to see what goods could come to complement the “paid media” that the Shop Beer Gear store could soon display.
