Coco Channel once said, “Luxury is a state of mind”. The LVMH Group which operates Moët Hennessy – the alcohol beverage brand which boasts of luxury brands including the Glenmorangie has over the years, claims to have built a luxury affair in India, through various experiential activities. For instance, its Delicious Design Project is one such project which pays an ode to India’s heritage culture.
In a conversation with BrandWagon Online, Smriti Sekhsaria, marketing director, Moet Hennessy India, talks about the luxury alcohol-beverage market in India and the company’s experiential marketing strategy. (Edited Excerpts)
Lately, many homegrown beverage brands have gone through premiumisation. Where is the luxury market of alcoholic beverage category in terms of consumption? How do you see the whiskey consumption navigating through?
About 80% of premium plus categorisation of spirits and wines in India is whisky, which means that whisky becomes a factor in how value gets created in the alcohol sector. With travelling opening up, a lot of consumers are buying bottles of fairly limited edition premium luxury scotches and whiskies. They are even experimenting with Japanese whiskies, which means people want variety and new things to talk about, which is leading to premiumisation. If you think about how whisky was consumed earlier, it would mean that you are moving from blended to scotch but now that movement can be seen within scotch as people are willing to pay for more unique products. So, it’s becoming a little bit more about the mentality of collection rather than consumption, which is leading to the behaviour of purchase as well. When it comes to whisky and top-end spirits, we are seeing very deep growth in India as well as globally.
As many other competitors who have gone ahead and rolled out Indian blends in the last few years. Do you also have a similar plan or you think the place that you have is perfect? Are you open to acquisitions?
I think we have a fairly large opportunity. We have a premium, high-quality differentiated brand of scotch whisky, led by Dr. Bill Lumsden, who is an award-winning master distiller. So, I think what we have and the kind of innovations we have undertaken within Glenmorangie have so much room to grow in India that it has become a very important market where we would rather invest money in a way that we get the returns on this track.
Additionally, we are part of the Moët Hennessy, which is the wines and spirits division of LVM Group. At a group level LVMH has about 78 brands and Moët Hennessy has about 22. Our businesses are operated in a way to enable growth through these heritage and legacy brands. We feel like we have a fantastic portfolio between Glenmorangie and Ardbeg. Both are single malts with very different profiles and there is so much room to grow that we don’t see at this point the need to focus anywhere.
You focus on creating various consumer experiences. How has that worked out? How do you go about consumer experiences? To what extent do these experiences help in taking the brand closer to consumers?
The approach is very refined, that is, we try to understand what our brands stand for and mean to the Indian audience. Then we create experiences which are unique for Indians, besides marketing the products one-on-one. We create experiences for premium Indian consumers, who are well travelled and have experienced international and luxury products and looking for experience over product. Hence, the whole immersion needs to be out of the box in terms of ideation and creativity, but it also needs to be something that is culturally resonating. For us, it is keeping track of the global Indian and their surroundings, what is going to be unique for them. For instance, Delicious Design Project, which is unique in its own way and allows us to celebrate the heritage culture of India.
Glenmorangie as a brand over the last three years has launched the new grand codes of grand rounds in India in a very big way. So, this is the third year of deep investments in India. I think our market share and our growth numbers in terms of volumes of sales. The second impact is more around digital voice as we see affinity towards Glenmorangie increasing.
As an alco-bev brand, you are not allowed to do direct marketing and only through the surrogate medium. So, when you create a strategy how do you measure the ROI?
I mean there is no straight answer to this and I think for us, there are no surrogates which means whatever we do on the ground becomes even more important for us because we create experiences. Thus, we focus on on-ground experiences. On digital, we don’t have a lot of influences. So, there are proxy measurements, and if my market share is increasing in the market where I’m doing on-ground experiences, if my share of affinity on digital radars is qualitatively increasing, then it is a proxy scale that looks like this is working.
How many experiential events do you do in a year and in which market?
With Glenmorangie, it has a fairly wide repertoire of different scales of events but if I just consider all kinds of scales of events that we do, I think it will be close to 200. About the market, I think it will be traditional key markets along with the luxury consumption markets with the biggest markets being Delhi, Chandigarh, Punjab, Haryana, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata.
What is the current challenge that you see in this sector?
I think that regulations around alcohol are something that we know is part of the industry and it is understood why those exist. There are some states which have made the process a lot more seamless. Regulations will exist and we have to learn to work around it. However, some states are demonstrating more tech-forward approaches, which are simpler and a bit more streamlined. It is a great opportunity for the industry to become a lot stronger, both in terms of regulations as well as in terms of compliance.
When it comes to homegrown versus global, I think you have a huge amount of respect for some of the originators as we have come such a long way because of the hard work that the industry has done. What is interesting is that Indians love international products, especially when it comes to luxury products, but they also love India based products. I feel what is going to start happening is an interesting mix of a real global mindset and proud Indian, at the bar.