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October 01, 2020

Campari Group raises the bar for customer experiences with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Campari Group knows how to create great brand experiences, and the beverage manufacturer always seeks to deepen its relationships with customers. To gain a 360-degree customer view and enhance the personalization of its marketing, sales, and customer service efforts, Campari Group deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing. The company has unified a fractured data landscape into a common customer data platform and accelerated time to market for new campaigns that support end-to-end customer journeys across the organization. With AI-driven recommendations and real-time, customer-led journey orchestration, Campari Group can personalize marketing messages for maximum impact across all customer touch points.

Campari Group

A sea of disconnected data

For 160 years, alcoholic spirits manufacturer Campari Group has been passionate about delivering great brand experiences for the consumers who enjoy its products, the bartenders who serve them, the restaurants, bars, and pubs that sell them, and the distributors that keep shelves stocked. Campari Group is a multigenerational, family-owned business with more than 60 brands, including Campari, Aperol, Wild Turkey, Skyy, Grand Marnier, and many others that generate a total of USD2 billion in annual global revenue. 

Campari Group has grown rapidly through acquisitions, each bringing in another IT landscape to assimilate. And the company works with more than 200 creative and digital agencies that use a variety of different software systems.

“We had a vast amount of data in different silos across the organization, which made it difficult to move the right data to the right place at the right time to make the right decisions,” says Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global IT – Marketing and Sales at Campari Group. “We needed to bring together all of our data from different channels and sources so that we can mold and develop relationships with our customers and bring them the truly excellent experiences we want them to have with our brands.”

Campari Group understands that a key to brand success is driving personalized engagement with its consumers and with the bartenders who pour the drinks and serve as brand ambassadors. To do this, Campari Group needs to make effective use of its data across marketing, sales, and customer service and develop a 360-degree customer view—but this proved challenging in the past. 

The right mix of features

To remedy its fragmented data landscape, Campari Group made it a goal to develop a comprehensive, cross-functional customer data platform (CDP) that could be used across the organization and its agencies to better target customer engagement activities. The company investigated all the major CDP software solutions and chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in conjunction with Dynamics 365 Marketing for several reasons, including compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Campari Group’s trust in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

“We looked at a number of factors, including cost efficiency, capabilities, global scale, ease of use, and the overall cultural fit with our organization—we wanted to work with a company that’s as passionate about its work as we are,” says Niemuth. “Because we’re dealing with customer data, security and compliance were very important considerations, and using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps us comply with GDPR and protect our customers’ information.”

By choosing Customer Insights, Campari Group gained access to sophisticated functionality to enhance the value that the company derives from its data. Using Microsoft Graph, the company can uniquely enrich unified customer profiles with brand affinities to generate look-alike models and high-value segments with qualified intent. And with Customer Insights, Campari Group can better understand customer activity across different campaigns and channels. For example, the company can now determine what drives specific interactions between the company and its customers, whether those customers are engaging with its website or participating in a retail contest. Campari Group decision makers also liked the flexible API integration framework that the platform provides for connection with a wide variety of external data stores and formats.

“In just two weeks, we connected all of the data points in Customer Insights and deployed our first email marketing automation campaign against those segments.”

Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global IT – Marketing and Sales, Campari Group

A recipe for success

After choosing Customer Insights, Campari Group began a process of thorough data exploration and cleanup. The company worked with Microsoft Partner Network member Fractal to establish API connectors to the numerous data sources that the company draws from, including social media, event marketing, and Wi-Fi connection databases. Once it completed this process, Campari Group quickly began to benefit from its investment, thanks to the out-of-the-box, AI-driven data segmentation capabilities of Customer Insights.

“In just two weeks, we connected all of the data points in Customer Insights and deployed our first email marketing automation campaign against those segments in the United States,” says Niemuth. “We then rolled out to the United Kingdom in two weeks and Australia in two weeks. With Dynamics 365, we’re able to be very agile and continuously roll out new capabilities for our campaigns.”

Because Campari Group works with so many different agencies, it needed its CDP to be easy to use and support, and this proved to be the case with Customer Insights and Marketing. 

“Given our lean organization, we want to minimize the amount of time spent on change management with all those agencies,” says Niemuth. “With Dynamics 365 apps, we get plentiful documentation along with numerous training videos online, leading to a great adoption experience. We haven’t gotten pushback or additional training requests from a single agency, and they’re already coming to us with ideas for how to extend the solution. They’re starting to push the envelope, which is outstanding.”

Reimagining engagement in challenging times

Campari Group went live with Customer Insights at the end of March 2020, just as many bars and restaurants were closing in response to COVID-19, and this has shaped the company’s early explorations with the app. One of the original goals for the deployment was to help gauge the success of Campari Academy events where bartenders engage with Campari Group products and learn how to incorporate new recipes, host events, and promote the brands. With COVID-19, the company sought to continue these trainings to help set bartenders up for a high level of success once workplaces reopen.

Before COVID-19 measures went into effect, Campari Group typically held in-person Academy events. But when travel became difficult, the events moved online, with a few dozen or, at most, 100 attendees dialing in to video chats in the United States. After deploying Customer Insights, Campari Group pulled a database of 20,000 bartenders into the system and created a marketing automation and email campaign to send them personalized messages. As a result, attendance at the events has increased to as many as 500 participants, four times a week, actively engaging with the company’s brand ambassadors.

Another industry heavily affected by COVID-19 has been wedding planning, so Campari Group stepped in with Customer Insights to engage with individuals and connect them with brand information targeted to their specific needs as they work through the now-difficult process of managing a wedding. “We created a trickle-based campaign that combines email, text, web, and geotargeting to deliver the information,” says Niemuth. “With Customer Insights, we can measure success metrics of the campaign in terms of the level of engagement customers are experiencing with the brand. It also sets the stage for future one-on-one engagements via social media and additional brand campaigns.”

A future built on strong ties

Campari Group is currently moving its on-premises SAP landscape to Azure, along with more of its IT resources, further centralizing its data by bringing both sales and consumer data into a single platform. The company is also exploring elements of Microsoft Power Platform, including Microsoft Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate, to gain additional functionality for deeper customer insights, create dynamic data flows, and add value to customer touch points. Other future plans include incorporating machine learning and advanced AI capabilities from Dynamics 365 and Azure for more sophisticated data insights and enhanced brand experiences.

While Campari Group has focused its initial efforts on marketing activities, it looks forward to helping other functional groups within the organization draw value from Customer Insights. “We want to use this data in an end-to-end way, from marketing to sales to customer service, capturing and optimizing the entire customer journey,” says Niemuth. “By better understanding customer sentiment and engagement, we’re better prepared for each new opportunity, whether that’s launching a new product, entering a new market, or building customer loyalty in new ways. That insight and business intelligence is critical for us.”

Moving forward, Campari is enhancing its marketing efforts with real-time, customer-led journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing. The company can now map the customer experience across different touch points—like email, mobile, social, and in-person—according to marketing segments and consumer types. “Customer journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing promotes contextually relevant and consistent real-time conversations with every customer across all interaction points,” explains Niemuth. “We can more precisely align marketing messages for each communication channel to gain the greatest impact. We see the effects in in-store sales and also in e-commerce, which is particularly important during COVID-19.”

Throughout its Dynamics 365 deployment, Campari Group has looked to Microsoft for advice and assistance, and the strength of the relationship has been an important factor in the success of the project. “The support we get from Microsoft is unparalleled,” says Niemuth. “Microsoft has provided us with guidance and a vision for the future, along with products that just keep getting better. It’s rare to find that level of passionate customer focus in business today.”

Find out more about Campari Group on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“Because we’re dealing with customer data, security and compliance were very important considerations, and using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps us comply with GDPR and protect our customers’ information.”

Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global IT – Marketing and Sales, Campari Group

Beginning September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will merge into a single offering under Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Learn more about the evolution of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

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