How Southern Glazer’s Bridges the BevAlc Data Gap

The beverage alcohol (BevAlc) industry faces a unique set of challenges compared to other consumer goods categories, including business fragmentation and complex routes to market. Until recently, there wasn’t much in the way of a direct path to data between suppliers, wholesalers and customers, according to Alan Wizemann, chief digital officer for Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits. 

As a keynote speaker at the Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Tech Summit, held Oct. 28–29 in Chicago, Wizemann took attendees behind the scenes of how today’s BevAlc network came to be — from the “noble experiment” known as Prohibition to the post-repeal creation of the three-tier system designed to regulate product quality and taxation.

That siloed network has typically kept suppliers blind to consumer behavior trends. For this reason, Southern Glazer’s transformed its entire organization to help build connectivity to that data so that consumers could better understand the value proposition of a brand. 

“When they’re drinking, what they’re drinking … all that information is coming from the distributor tier. It’s not coming from the suppliers or advertising campaigns,” said Wizemann.