Constellation Brands Overview

Approach

A five week project was scoped utilizing the five stages of design thinking. Our design process can be viewed below.

Research

We realized that the app had the potential to do so much more. Key takeaways and insights from our subject matter expert (SME) interviews proved that the current state of Ambassador required a lot of digging, and a lot of information on products was hidden. From our interviews, we understood that our client wanted a social aspect to their application and for their employees become ambassadors. We conducted domain research and a competitive analysis of social applications revolving around digital liquor, organized events, and rating platforms to look into areas of opportunity.

User Interviews

We interviewed users from different departments across Constellation Brands to get an understanding of employee incentives, and what specifically they found to be difficult with Ambassador.

Key Takeaways

• Many internal employees were not aware that Ambassador existed.

• Employees were brand loyal, and wanted to expand their knowledge in areas they were unfamiliar with. Most representatives were only educated in one of the three categories of alcohol; either beer, wine, or spirits.

• Employees found it difficult to search for specific CBI products and were only able to view this information by tapping on vendor information or specific stores.

• All employees received an annual stipend to spend on CBI products. Many employees found it difficult to track purchases of their annual stipend. This resulted in some users spending their entire stipend in one purchase, missing out on opportunities to try other products.

• If employee engagement with CBI products is increased, brand awareness and education will grow, and employees can reinvest within their own company.

“Know more, Drink more, Sell more”

— SME Constellation Brands

“The more we learn about the total company portfolio, the more we’re able to raise a glass and raise our sales”

— User #1

“Well I have to search, I’d have to click on each store to see if the store carries it”

— User #2

“There should be a way to create an easy way to record wine that I like to easily share with friends”

— User #3

Synthesizing Our Research

We decided to affinity map our research and data to find common themes and to focus on what problem we were truly trying to solve for. We utilized the Rose, Thorn, Bud technique to identify things as positive, negative, or having potential. After organizing and sorting our research we identified three common trends and themes amongst users. These trends consisted of Brand Education, Brand Loyalty, and Search Limitations.

Visualizing the process for Abigail, a Community Affairs Manager, of her journey to find a new product she wants to try in the current state of the application helped us to understand her pain points.

Problem Statement

The brand conscious CBI employee needs a digital platform to access brand information, because they want to share and promote their products to grow relationships and celebrate the brand with friends and family.

Design Principles

Ideation

Referencing our design principles, problem statement, and user insight, we narrowed down our concepts to four. These concepts included an Allowance Tracker, Virtual Shelf, Event Shaker, and Search + Filter. Our goal was to increase brand knowledge, brand education, and fix search limitations.

Final Product

Tasked by my team to converge our prototype, I took our wireframes and created high fidelity mockups. These features include Search and Filter, Event Shaker, and My Shelf (favorites). Although the Allowance Tracker tested well, we ultimately decided it was not aligned with our problem statement and didn’t include it when converging our solution. I added it below for reference purposes.

Final Thoughts

I wished I had pushed harder to state my case more clearly for the Allowance Tracker, because from user interviews there was a need for it. This feature could have also been beneficial for CBI to understand more in depth how employees spend their allowance. My team shared a goal and vision, and ultimately this tradeoff was due to a time constraint. Incorporating centralized access to events such as wine tastings and music festivals to share information around events could also be an opportunity for the future. 

It was a pleasure working on a project for Constellation Brands. This project was challenging, and there were many different directions we could have taken it. Surprisingly, we had a lot of feedback from a wide range of employees who had little, if any knowledge about Ambassador. This pushed us in a specific direction and focus around how we could present users with more knowledge surrounding CBI’s portfolio and the brand. As a team we were happy to work on a project that would ultimately offer actionable insights for CBI, a company with a portfolio of over 100 brands available to all its employees.