Customer Stories Constellation

Retail Footprint

DTC Ecommerce
Wholesale

Industry

Beverage

Annual Revenue

$10B

Website

cbrands.com

Constellation Brands uses SoundCommerce to unify marketing and operations data from over 100 endpoints. This helps unearth actionable insights that enable the team to intelligently shape their business.

About

Founded in 1945, Constellation Brands is a Fortune 500 producer and marketer of beer, wine, and spirits and is home to brands like Corona, Modelo Especial, and SVEDKA Vodka. It is one of the fastest-growing US-based consumer product goods company.

The challenge

For decades, Constellation Brands, Inc., (CBI) operated as a traditional distributor-based wholesale business. When the pandemic turned this model on its head in early 2020, CBI faced its new reality head-on and began its journey into the direct-to-consumer (DTC) world. While this type of customer-centric, omnichannel approach is common among beauty and fashion brands, CBI was a first mover among alcoholic beverage brands, which are typically tied to legacy wholesale operating models.

It began a process of digital transformation that included partnerships with third-party providers like Drizly, Instacart, and Kroger.com; the acquisition of DTC wine brand Empathy Wine; and the creation of consumer-facing websites for each of its key brands, powered by Shopify Plus.

However, to provide a customer-centric experience, CBI needed to unify the first-party data collected from its websites, subscription models, email/SMS providers, loyalty platforms, Net Promoter Score (NPS) platforms, Google Analytics, and customer service modules. CBI then needed to combine this data with the Shopify Plus platform it had designed to be at the core of its tech ecosystem.

For the first time ever, we’re looking at how to engage consumers and have them consider direct purchases … where our role is to be able to provide “surprise and delight” moments to the consumer, take advantage of all that great first-party data, and engage them in a more custom fashion.

—Jon Troutman, VP of DTC Marketing at Constellation Brands

The solution

CBI sought SoundCommerce’s help to gather, organize, and store all the data from across its new ecosystem. By partnering with SoundCommerce, CBI can now automate data ingestion into a central data warehouse, which allows data teams to avoid silos and quickly analyze massive amounts of data. Leveraging SoundCommerce’s prebuilt retail data connectors, no-code platform environment, and out-of-the-box data models means that the team at CBI can spend more time on gaining insights from their data, not managing data flows.

Because the data is being recorded and stored in real time, CBI can easily answer complicated business questions that help it stay nimble with product offerings and iterate on marketing strategies at the speed of consumer preferences.

Key results

173,571

Customer Accounts

7 DTC Brands

Unified and consolidated data

100+

SaaS endpoints connected

With SoundCommerce, CBI can:

Move beyond revenue measurement to measuring how, when, and where marketing programs will drive the most profitable transactions
Design marketing campaigns aligned with inventory availability and marketing calendars
Calculate customer lifetime value over customer acquisition cost per unique customer ID

SoundCommerce helps our Marketing team understand how we’re performing operationally to make better business decisions, like which channels we want to continue marketing on based on lifetime value analysis.