Johnnie Walker collaborates with Amazon Alexa to help customers

DECEMBER 8, 2016

How do you bring whiskey education to more than one million people? It’s a real challenge, and traditional methods alone don’t always work (thanks to high cost and low reach). Johnnie Walker has a mission to educate over one million people by summer 2017, and was looking for new ways to achieve this goal. In partnership with VaynerMedia, they turned to Amazon Alexa, confident that voice technology could help them provide users with deeper content in the digital space while reaching a new group of consumers.

The idea was to help people get to know Johnnie Walker whiskeys at their own speed. Whiskey can seem a little intimidating, and they wanted to create an experiential marketing campaign that was accessible, personally relevant, easy to interact with, and engaging for Amazon customers.

Johnnie Walker collaborated with Alexa to build a dynamic experience that puts customers in control of their learning: some users like learning whiskey history or label facts, others want help choosing a bottle to buy based on their taste preferences, and still more like the experience of a guided whiskey tasting. They even built in the right checks to ensure shoppers are over 21 with voice commands. If a customer is interested in purchasing, the skill can complete a purchase via an integrated e-commerce fulfillment partner, or find a nearby store based on user location.

quoteUpVoice control is a new and exciting technology that we were interested to try. Alexa is the perfect service, because its rapidly growing user base looks to it as a hub of innovative experiences from brands interested in having new conversations.quoteDown
Stephanie Jacoby, Vice President of Johnnie Walker North America

Now that the Johnnie Walker skill has launched, they are collecting customer feedback. They want their loyal customers to enable and engage with the skill, so they can see what they like and what can be improved. They will be rolling out updates based on these learnings over the coming months.

One way Johnnie Walker is spreading the word about the new skill is through a display advertising campaign, which was featured on Amazon.com and across Amazon’s mobile app and web experiences to help Amazon customers discover the skill and help drive skill enablement.

As conversational commerce and connected devices continue to grow, this is a new and evolving way for Johnnie Walker to reach consumers in a new, engaging way and accomplish their business objectives.

The skill is available on the Amazon Echo, Amazon Tap, Echo Dot or Amazon Fire TV— simply say “Alexa, enable Johnnie Walker” to get started. Or you can learn more about the skill on Johnnie Walker’s website.