Like most brands these days, drinks brands exist in a hyper-competitive world of constant promotion and communication, one where media fragmentation has made it increasingly difficult to cut through the noise and get a brand message heard, let alone acted upon.

But consider this. No matter what journey the consumer takes to discover your brand on a retail shelf, all roads lead to what P&G call the ‘first moment of truth’ – picking up your bottle and buying your brand. The second moment of truth occurs at home when the bottle is in use, which of course impacts on the loyalty to the brand and the intention to buy it again next time.

Up until recently, once the bottle or can was with the consumer that was the end of its connection with its producers. But now we have the technology to turn any drinks container we wish into digitised, identifiable, data-generators that go way beyond entertaining the consumer.

The question is, are we truly making the most of this?

Three years ago Medea Vodka took digital and meshed it with personalisation. The result was a bottle that enables their consumers to create digital, illuminated messages.

Personalisation too was the focus for Diageo’s ‘smart’ Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle. All it requires is a smart phone to detect if the bottle has been opened or not, and then send relevant, personalised messages to consumers who read the bottle's sensor tags with their smart phones.

When Grolsch took to exploring virtual worlds they unveiled a beer bottle that contained next-generation Bluetooth beacon technology that allowed consumers to access free movies via the digitally enhanced bottles. When a consumer opens a bottle the beacon in the cap connects to the shoppers’ previously registered smartphone and enables them to access a movie of their choice by tapping the bottle with their device.

But isn’t all of this a little clunky and dare we say it, gimmicky? Once the novelty wears off, and that will happen quite rapidly, consumers are left wondering what all the fuss was about. They may have briefly been engaged, the experience may even have been somewhat immersive, but it is not a lasting emotion and it doesn’t do much for loyalty.

Digital could do so much more. So the big question is are we truly looking in depth at each touchpoint to ensure a bottle’s entire journey from concept to recycling is optimised? And are marketers set up to make the most of the wealth of data brands can potentially gather? The short answer is, no, not yet.

In which case, what do we need to do to optimise the digital tools we can tap into?

CRADLE TO GRAVE

The impact of digitalisation is so powerful that most marketers and brand designers are only just grasping the need for a more holistic approach.

Marketers need to adopt a cradle to grave mindset that extends way beyond the consumer’s experience of a bottle. They need to go right back to the beginning as a bottle can potentially start gathering valuable data from the moment it leaves the distillery.

KNOWING WHAT TO KNOW

This data can not only inform manufacturers and later retailers, it can potentially be used as marketing material. This is particularly the case for more specialist and premium beverages where the entire production lifecycle could be turned into a narrative.

Certainly a bottle can now have its temperature monitored, its entire journey to shelf tracked and it can offer rapid and effective cashier scanning. If it is a premium brand that risks counterfeiting across markets it could even be tracked for proof of origin. Likewise a rare beverage could benefit from theft or fraud prevention via these digital identification techniques. But, more to the point, the fact that it can now tell its own life story is a powerful marketing tool.

The key is to define what we want to know, in other words, what information we want the bottle to gather along its journey. Then we need to establish how best to manage this data to ensure the experience is not just smooth and efficient but engaging and relevant. Creating awareness is one thing, offering an experience consumers want to share is another.

Digitally enabled packaging holds product identification data that can be updated in real time throughout the supply chain all the way to when it is with the consumer. As a bottle makes its way through the distribution chain, each stop can be reflected in the data. It can also serve as a launch point for communication between brands and consumers via their smartphones. This kind of clever technology should be delivering sophisticated brand messages, personalisation is no longer much of a draw card, even if it is illuminated.

KNOWING YOU

This of course is the most exciting part, when it reaches the consumer - that interaction is what gets marketers and designers really excited. Establishing how consumers best interact with a drinks brand and how to apply the most relevant marketing campaigns around this requires deep diving into how consumers interact with this specific product.

As technology supplies consumers’ views of the real world with an overlay of digital content, a vodka bottle can now broadcast its own advertising, show a 3D version of the bottle contents in action, or take the consumer straight to an entertaining microsite or app, all with a quick swipe of the smartphone.

RELEVENT OR ENTERTAINMENT?

From a drink brand’s perspective, once the consumer brings the bottle home and scans it to reveal this additional information, they have valuable data they can tap in to. This ethically sourced data belongs to the brand owner and opens up a whole new potential channel for engaging with consumers. However, if it is not used to make the product more relevant it risks missing vital opportunities to truly engage on an emotional level.

As such the focus should be less on turning bottles into a multi-media experience and much more on being targeted and relevant. We are still some way off designer gin bottles understanding who we are and our motivations by themselves. But when combined with barcode technology and store card data, with access to our product history, our drinks brands could begin to become trusted lifestyle advisors in possession of more knowledge about who we are than we realise.

GIMMICK OR AUTHENTIC?

Many of the digital extensions we are currently seeing on packs and bottles are still being created as entertaining promotions - drinks marketers need to ask themselves whether they are creating gimmicks or delivering real value to the consumer. Is the digital overlay offering an immersive and memorable experience or a one-off cheap toy?

Whilst manufacturers now have a multitude of reasons to wrap their products in brand stories that can come to life at the swipe of a smart phone, the benefits need to be analysed and amplified at each touch point otherwise a pack can offer efficient cashier scanning and fraud prevention, yet disappoint on consumer delivery or vice versa.

Now that the digital innovation dust has started to settle, we should start seeing a host of on-pack digital campaigns that genuinely build engagement, dialogue, extra value and loyalty between consumers and brands.

Shifting from gimmick to game-changer will ensure smart drinks packaging really delivers on the innovation opportunities it promises.