Imagine walking into a bar, taking out your phone, opening a drink app called “Hooch”-- and seeing an entire list of cocktails customized just for you -- all of which are being served at that bar.
Or imagine owning a bar and knowing exactly which cocktails your customers will order beforehand. This will ensure that you always have the right amount of alcohol available, which could result in increased sales and revenue.
Does this sound too good to be true? Well, good news – it’s not.
Lin Dai is the CEO of Hooch, the “free drinks” app that charges members $9.99 a month to get one free cocktail or beer each day at different participating bars/clubs in select cities. Hooch works with over 500 bars in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, San Diego, New Jersey, Hong Kong and more.
Hooch benefits both its users and the bars they partner with. Its members discover new venues where their first drink is free and bars gain new customers that they can immediately upsell additional drinks or food to. Hooch is especially appealing for bar owners, as a typical customer will order about 2-3 drinks each time they use Hooch. Most bars working with Hooch report additional revenue throughout the night, while users remain in “good spirits” since their first drink is always free.
Smart Data And Drinking Go Hand-In-Hand
While Hooch is revolutionizing the bar industry, the subscription-based app isn’t only focused on providing Hooch’s 100,000 users with thirty cocktails for $9.99 a month. The real secret sauce behind Hooch is the “smart data” it collects from its users to better understand customer behavior and drinking trends.
Unlike big data, smart data focuses on smaller data sets that can be turned into actionable insights to address customer and business challenges. Smart data is also available in real-time to determine a variety of business outcomes.
In a marketing and customer-experience context, smart data is seen from a hyper-personalization dimension. In other words, Hooch collects smart data from its users to help bars and the spirit industry make better product and marketing decisions, while providing users with a seamless way to order cocktails based on their previous drink preferences.
“One major challenge the alcohol industry faces is understanding customer behavior and trends. Hooch is uniquely positioned in a way that allows us to collect better data in real-time at bars than any other source,” said Lin. “For instance, based on the smart data we collect, we can determine demographic, geographic and time-based data that can be useful for bars in a number of ways. Hooch is becoming the bridge for bars to identify and reach out to their highest-value customers. Spirit companies can look at trends in real-time to make better product and marketing decisions. We ultimately plan to use smart data to help bars and the spirit industry market better to consumers.”
Collecting smart data allows Hooch to provide non-personal demographic, geographic and time-based data to bars and alcohol companies they partner with. As Lin mentioned, most brands have a difficult time accurately identify their high-value customers. For example, Grey Goose Vodka might know that they are selling twelve cases a month to a top-performing New York bar, but they don’t know who the customers are demographic wise, that are buying these drinks, and how frequently they go back to the same bar over a given period.
However, understanding customer behavior can result in a number of benefits for both bars and spirits companies. For example, if bars had a better idea of the most popular drinks their male versus female customers were ordering, they would be sure to stock certain alcohol brands and tweak their cocktail menus to maximize sales. And, if spirit providers knew exactly which customers were ordering their product, they could start targeting people through in-store promotions and customer-specific social-media campaigns.
As of now though, the alcohol industry mostly relies on third-party survey data to better understand consumer trends. For instance, spirits companies purchase reports from research companies who survey bartenders every six months to ask if they remember certain things about how customers order drinks.
Yet Hooch is capable of collecting real-time data from users, allowing them to provide bars and spirits brands with real-time customer insights up to six months sooner than traditional research companies. Hooch is growing from being a free drink app to becoming a technology and data platform for the alcohol industry.
Hooch is also looking at smart data to create what Lin refers to as, “the Netflix of drinks.” Just as Netflix shows users a list of movie and show recommendations based on their viewing history, Hooch plans to provide users with a list of drink recommendations based on their order history. For example, if a Hooch user tends to order cocktails made with rum, the app will start to offer and curate a selection of unique rum cocktail options for that user to consider. This new feature will make ordering drinks though Hooch even easier (and tastier!).
Smart Data = Smarter Drinking
Of course, with drinking also comes a number of safety concerns. Fortunately, Hooch is also using smart data to allow users to smartly order drinks, as features are going to be added in the future that estimate blood-alcohol content. Additionally, Hooch is also working on creating a next-generation mobile payment platform, which would allow users to purchase each drink directly from their smart phones (no more forgotten credit cards at bars).
It seems as if the benefits smart data can bring to the alcohol industry are endless. Better understanding customer behavior and consumer trends will ultimately allow bars, spirits companies and consumers to make overall smarter drinking decisions and choices. Cheers to that!