How to create personalized experiences

Beam Suntory owns and operates over 90 alcoholic brands, and is the 3rd largest producer of distilled beverages worldwide. Beam Suntory’s digital challenges required more than a standard design or development agency. They required a top-of-the-line multidisciplinary team of digital experts that could orchestrate and execute a complex 360º strategy. That’s when they called us.

One of the most relevant projects we have done together with Beam Suntory was called My Beam Label. The idea was to print a picture of your face, along with a message on a Jim Beam bottle. The project was born from a marketing action with a strong technological component.

The UX team elaborated a flow where the camera on the user’s browser and/or mobile device took a picture, adjusted it on the frontend to match the label size, and also allowed personalized text inputs. We managed to solve this challenge thanks to our frontend team.

Once the label was validated, it was sent to the Jim Beam printer in each country to be attached to the bottle, which in turn was sent to the address provided. There were many difficulties we had to face, to name a few:
-> 12 different countries.
-> Identifying forbidden words through blacklisting, across several languages
-> Dynamically scaling the architecture with our DevOps team - AWS for the demand peaks that occurred during launch.
-> Delivery to different printers without loss of quality.
-> Metrics tracking for KPI optimization.

One of the main initiatives in which we are participating is the so-called Website Factory. There is a vast number of brands under the Beam Suntory group, each with its own corporate website. Each site serves a different technology, country, etc. The challenge is to create a proprietary framework for the development of corporate websites. A personal CMS to ensure consistency and traceability across Beam Suntory’s digital ecosystem.

Any new or existing brand will be able to build, manage, and deploy different versions of their brand’s site. The system will also count with a system of agile translations so that each country can manage it in the CMS autonomously. All this through an easy-to-use user interface.