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Beer Hawk

Beer Discovery Game

Creating a truly omnichannel consumer experience for AB InBev’s innovative Beer Hawk brand.

  • Games & Tech

  • Design & Animation

The Challenge

When the UK’s leading online craft beer retailer opened its first bricks and mortar bar, they had a problem. With over 500 products on offer, how could they effectively help every customer find a beer they loved, even when the bar was slammed?

The Solution: An interactive web-app

Create a bespoke web-app to guide people through a series of questions on taste-preferences. Design a UI that’s eye-catching, engaging and simple enough for (very thirsty) pub-goers to find a beer quickly, that genuinely matches their tastes (no gimmicks) and offer them a cheeky discount if they register online.

A truly omnichannel brand

Originating as a digital brand, Beer Hawk understood the value of consumer data and wanted a way to bring the in-bar experience and ecommerce together. They provide a brilliant experience for beer aficionados at the bar and wanted to translate that same level of service and expertise into a digital application. Partly to scale up the process - who wants to stand behind somebody tasting 10 beers at a busy bar? - but also to capture peoples’ data and convert them into online customers too. By embedding tech into the in-store customer journey, Beer Hawk created an exciting omnichannel experience that benefitted both parts of their business.

A higher customer lifetime value

Modern consumers want retail experiences that function seamlessly between online and physical locations. Bricks & mortar stores now operate as showrooms, where consumers can browse, discover and sample products, with the help of specialists with expert knowledge.

Bridging this in-person experience with online sales channels is a powerful approach; developing an omnichannel distribution strategy was a key priority for Beer Hawk.

Blending technology into the retail space in such a way that consumers can explore and experience the brand in a deeper, more personal way, and purchase both in-store and online has been proven to recruit customers with a higher lifetime value than a single channel approach.

Style & Substance

The design and UI of the web-app had to be simple, interactive and fun. We used an eye-catching, highly illustrative style, animated start screens and loading graphics to entice customers to play, and kept the questions brief and playful, to make it easy for people to complete the process.

The game was responsive to both tablet and mobile screen sizes so people could play on an iPad at the bar, or on their own phones.

Crucially, the questions were carefully crafted to ascertain proper responses from the customers. The game wasn’t a gimmick - Beer Hawk’s customers take their beer seriously and the reputation and credibility of Beer Hawk rides on providing expert beer advice to them.

The game had to point people to a genuinely great match for their preferences. We worked with Beer Hawks’ beer specialists to build a decision tree that matched peoples’ answers to a perfect beer recommendation.

Using The Data

After people played the game, they were offered a small discount to use in the bar if they signed up online. More than 65% of players did, driving immediate sales in the bar, and increasing Beer Hawk’s online database. They then used the data as part of their ongoing CRM strategy with the ultimate aim of converting those bar customers into valuable customers of their at home beer products.

12,000

Game plays in the first week

8,000

New online customers