https://www.mocu.com.au/

Where the world of art collides with the artisans of craft beer to create a multichannel ecommerce experience.

• Lion’s history is as a beer brand builder and alcohol wholesaler. But with the beer category in decline, and Coles & Woolies producing more own-brand craft beer at low cost, Lion realised they needed to move into the direct-to-consumer market with an ecommerce play.
• We undertook a series of about 30 contextual enquiries along the eastern seaboard to understand buyer behaviours, both online and offline. Interestingly for every problem that ecommerce seemed to solve with beer, it created a series of new problems. For example, how to handle cold logistics and storage, would individual beer cartons or 6-packs survive transit, what happens if customers aren’t home to receive delivery, how would customers return faulty product, etc.
• In addition, it became clear that Lion needed to avoid competing with large retailers like Dan Murphys online, but rather pursue a ‘Blue Ocean’ strategy. Through a series of focus groups, we narrowed in on a particular underserved persona known as the Bourgious Bohemian (or BoBo https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2000/may/28/focus.news1). The gap that was revealed that there was a shopping paradox for these BoBos – offline shopping for alcohol was often a painful & rushed event, needing to navigate long queues and entertaining one’s children, whereas shopping online was merely transactional, with very little thought given to creating engaging experiences in the way that visiting a winery is a sensory experience.
• Designing and delivering to this vision then became a complex service design workstream, requiring new packaging, warehousing & delivery systems, integration with antiquated back-office systems, building a new digital content management and ordering system on Adobe Experience Manager, and designing an entirely new type of ecommerce experience to sit on top of the infrastructure. The existing service barely delivers on any of this vision, but it is a solid working version of the end-to-end possibilities.