Selling Through People You Don't Employ
The Situation
Coors Light was underperforming with Hispanic consumers — a segment central to the brand’s growth. The existing approach segmented that market demographically, which produced marketing that described the audience accurately and connected with it poorly.
There was a second problem, and it was the harder one. In beer, the brewer does not reach the consumer. The distributor network does. A national strategy that distributors do not believe in is a document.
What Was Done
Re-segmented the Hispanic market from demographic-based to occasion-based — organizing around when and why people drink rather than who they are. That reframing changed what the brand needed to say and where it needed to show up.
The second half of the engagement was execution architecture: researching what the distributor network was already doing, understanding their economics and incentives, and building the strategy in a way distributors would adopt. Their buy-in was treated as a design constraint rather than a rollout step, which is the reason the strategy actually reached shelf.
What Changed
- Approximately $85M in incremental revenue*
- Distributor network aligned and executing against a common strategy
Relevant if: your growth depends on brokers or distributors executing a plan they had no part in building.