Chivas Brothers
Brand Lab: Product Innovation
Collaborating with creators to shape products and experiences...
Populating The Pipeline
Our work for Pernod Ricard – and across their priority brands, such as Chivas, Ballantine’s, Passport, Beefeater, Absolut and Malibu – often takes in cultural immersion, foundational insights and identifying emergent needs. But it also includes working at the sharper end of innovation and development.
With outputs from previous projects that we’d conducted for Pernod Ricard functioning as springboards, this work for Chivas needed to get to outcomes that would populate the innovation pipeline – new products and experiences to keep the brand fresh and relevant, future-proofing Pernod Ricard’s whisky portfolio for the Gen Z audience.
Creating A Brand Lab
+ Leveraging learnings from previous rounds of insight work, we pinpointed three credible springboards to work with and build upon
+ Next, digging into our KIN network, we invited a carefully casted selection of Gen Z micro influencers/creators - with backgrounds in entrepreneurialism, wellbeing, fashion and design - to collaborate in a two day brand innovation lab at Crowd DNA's London HQ
+ The first day majored on familiarising our Gen Z consultants (split into competing teams) with the three springboards, inspiring them with visual and tactile stimulus.
+ Next, we engaged them in a series of innovation workshopping activities, producing a considerable range of fresh ideas that aligned to each of the territories.
+ Bringing an Apprentice-style dynamic into play, Chivas Brothers stakeholders then selected their preferred ideas, which were further refined throughout the afternoon.
+ Ensuring pace and agility to the project, these concepts were then tested overnight via a community of Gen Z consumers from around the world.
+ And so to day two - wherein the ideas that were demonstrating the greatest traction and appeal were refined, before pitching these ideas once again to Chivas Brothers stakeholders .
Brand Lab Outcomes
Broadly, the initiative explored themes as diverse as refillable bottles, female empowerment and creating new cultural spaces. Particular product innovations to emerge are a new form of NoLo whisky and a beer that utilises the whisky distilling process to create a zero waste product offering.
