Last Friday saw the unveiling of all the winners of the Annual Australian Catalogue Association Awards (ACA) for 2016. Here, in this second case study, B&T takes a look at how catalogues have become the go-to media for Australia’s premier liquor purveyors…

Liquor retailing is a $17.7 billion industry in Australia and marketing within the liquor sector is highly competitive and ever-changing. What was once television and outdoor media dominated, catalogue marketing has grown in this sector with great results. Four awards across the Liquor sector were on offer at the 25^th ACA Awards this year with Dan Murphy’s the big winner taking the ‘Liquor’ category, however how is this industry using catalogues to engage customers?

Last Friday, Dan Murphy’s triumphed over all four categories with their catalogues produced by Hardie Grant and Red Jelly, winning ‘Liquor’ with Dan Murphy’s Buyer’s Guide – Winter 2015, ‘Magalogues – All categories’ with Cocktail Discovery Guide 2015, ‘Campaign Series’, and the highly regarded ‘Catalogue Retailer of the Year – over 3.5m’.

“A big congratulations to the entire Dan Murphy’s team! Our catalogue creative is imperative to Dan Murphy’s multi-channel marketing campaigns. We are thrilled to come out with some winners on the night – it’s been an amazing year for us!” Yolanda Uys, head of marketing at Dan Murphy’s.

Dan Murphy’s have developed a multi-tiered approach to their catalogue campaigning offering tabloid sales driven catalogues to market regularly balanced with informative and content rich ‘Buyers Guides’.

“We are honoured to win this award for the second year in a row. At Dan Murphy’s we are committed to giving our customers informative content, and our ever evolving catalogues and the team dedication has really paid off tonight. We are looking forward to another successful year,” said Chelsea Hinchliffe, publications manager at Dan Murphy’s.

The ‘Buyer’s Guide’ is positioned to educate customers about product ranges, regions and/or countries that may not be known of or understood. This story-telling positions the Dan Murphy’s brand into one of authority and connects with customers emotionally with well-considered content.

First Choice Liquor also holds strong with their tabloid format catalogue delivering week on week transactional sales uplifts, with the greatest sales achieved for front and back page product placements. First Choice Liquor recognise the value of local area marketing for their catalogue customisation aligning product range with distribution areas closest to stores.

P.A.L.S Seasonal Liquor Guide gained strength in building a guide that demonstrated product range from selective Rum lines to Wine and Liqueur ranges. This sees P.A.L.S picking up one of the catalogues key attributes and one that pushing the dialogue with customer’s to and from physical to online and vice versa. Online being a quick and specific message pushing to catalogues provides the opportunity for a longer conversation and allows customers to explore product range.

Vintage Cellars have taken learnings from other market sectors exploration into brandzines, releasing ‘Cellar Press’ in a magazine format catalogue. Vintage Cellars offer their loyalty program, ‘The Wine Club’ customers’ early access to high quality, yet great value, products by engaging cellarmasters and winemakers to build information rich content.

Liquor catalogues are well read in Australia with a 22 per cent readership every four weeks. Some 34 per cent of readers also buy something featured in a liquor catalogue every week seeing catalogues working hard for their investment. Reported by Roy Morgan as the Media Most Useful when making a Liquor purchasing decision by 42 per cent of Australians, the catalogue in whichever form working for the Liquor retailers across the country is here to stay and here to deliver both sales to retailers and value to the customers.