Proven Website Marketing Tactics: 1 Large and 5 Small Changes That Got Big Results

Quick Case Study #1: Bacardi automates website to more quickly respond to customer needs, reduce infrastructure cost 42%

Bacardi is the world’s largest privately held spirits company, operating in more 270 markets with more than 200 brands and labels. Its digital portfolio consists of over 150 websites and 2,500 web domains, making it challenging to offer a consistent and engaging digital presence for their customers.

“As part of a long-term strategy focused on our digital transformation and e-commerce, Bacardi wanted to make it easy for consumers to find, explore and order our portfolio of premium spirits brands, be it via traditional retailers, via ecommerce or through delivery partners,” said Chris Windebank, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, Bacardi. This effort was dramatically accelerated by the shift to online shopping habits caused by the Covid-19 pandemic’s lockdowns.

“Bacardi had made significant investments in its Digital Marketing Platform, which was built to deliver all of Bacardi’s website functionality and was hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS),” said Jason Harman, Co-Head Global Business, SVP, EPAM, Bacardi’s vendor on the project.

This solution was not being used to its full potential. The platform had many manual deployment processes that were prone to errors, resulting in significant overhead, critical availability issues and bottlenecks. Because each website had its own separate component and set-up, deployments were executed in silos, making automation challenging at scale. In addition, third-party components used on each siloed website differed in quality, which posed a constant risk to availability.

To address these concerns, the team migrated all sites to AWS under the DevOps platform.

This migration helped on the front end as well. As consumers shifted their cocktail consumption to the home, Bacardi need to create a direct-to-consumer process to meet customers where they were spending their time. The team created a one-stop-shop experience on Bacardi’s websites by integrating shop links on the pages of core brands. “From the outside, the experience was B2C with purchases directed through the website; behind the scenes Bacardi linked websites with partners to have the capability to sell and deliver, including Amazon and Instacart,” Harman said.

In addition to the better customer experience, streamlining Bacardi’s digital environment by implementing a DevOps automation platform resulted in 16 times greater website deployment capacity and a 42% reduction in infrastructure costs.

“Start with a clear vision, set targets, measure along the way and, most importantly, be ready to pivot when needed. Our new solution allows to do just that which has been so helpful when following the latest trends in what people may be drinking. We can adapt quickly to put trending or new products in front of consumers with greater ease,” Windebank said.

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