Bud e-Socialising

Forecasting Trends During Covid

As part of AB InBev's internal innovation programme, Quicksand identified e-socialising as a key trend, given how digital platforms enabled new ways of staying connected. This involved close collaboration with the Brand, Product, and Innovation leads at the company.

Among the many post-Covid trends we had identified, such as home cooking, home entertainment, and social distancing, e-socialising particularly resonated with the client, who expressed interest in exploring it further. Two primary themes emerged:

Connecting with friends and family: This became an everyday affair, with entire families or groups of friends gathering on online platforms. Many consumers even reconnected with friends and family they hadn’t spoken to in a long time.

Celebrating and sharing special moments: In the pre-Covid world, celebrations such as birthdays or the end of a tough work week were key social moments. With physical isolation, these moments became tech-enabled, like friends gathering on a video call to celebrate a birthday.

Building on this, we explored e-socialising in the context of food and drinks, conducting user and expert research to identify opportunities and trends across music, entertainment, and remote socialising to unpack imaginations of a beer-adjacent party-from-home.

Imagining and Testing Concepts with Users

Our foundational desk research on Covid socialising trends covered a wide range of topics, including productivity apps, ‘phygital’ services, and virtual events, all aligned with AB InBev’s passion points.

We mapped tech platforms where people were gathering virtually, such as Zoom, Discord, House Party, and Chatroulette, as well as collaborative working platforms like Miro and Whiteboard. We analysed why certain platforms were more effective than others and examined how different industries were crafting immersive virtual experiences—from fashion and music to online gaming and culinary trends. We also explored the idea of the ‘phygital’, and looked at remote community entertainment behaviours across streaming platforms, virtual festivals, chat rooms, and gamified communities.

Our consumer research involved in-depth interviews with the target group to understand changing socialising patterns and pain points. We also conducted expert interviews with thought leaders and diverse F&B, entertainment, and tech professionals to gain a broad perspective on changing trends. All these interviews helped us identify barriers to e-socialising, such as lulls in conversation, awkward interactions, the cognitive load of video calls compounded by tech troubles, and how virtual experiences remained fundamentally different from real-life interactions. Other insights revealed how lack of curation, facilitation, or moderation in e-socialising experiences led to tedious interactions, and how social engagement through screens demanded higher attention and effort for diminishing returns.

Validating Ideas Through Quick, Simulated Experiments

Before committing R&D budgets to develop any idea into a live prototype, we illustrated a short selection of ideas with key details to gauge customer interest and their likelihood of using or paying for these ideas. Using illustrated concept cards, we engaged users in brief conversations through card-sorting exercises to get a temperature check on the desirability of the ideas. After downselecting from our initial concepts, we moved on to developing prototypes — this included virtual music festivals, at-home parties, physical party kits that were delievered to participants along with food and beverages. We tested this prototypes by bringing together people from different cities for a digital show and observing their experiences. This helped us evaluate scalability, business models, and audience engagement. We analysed the potential to scale these concepts, considering the business model, costs, revenues, and target audiences.

We tested our final MVPs with Event Collective, a Bombay-based event planning company that helped create games, quizzes, and trivia rounds for these parties. To operationalise these ideas, we also explored potential partners for distribution, marketing, and production. Two main concepts were finalised:

1. Custom bar experiences: This concept involved equipping small groups of friends to create their own custom bar experiences, complete with food, alcohol, exclusive entertainment, curated music, and tech, all delivered to their doorstep. This was tested in four cities (Mumbai, New Delhi, Goa, Kolkata) with 48 participants and 7 MVPs. Examples included immersive experiences like recreating a night of dancing at a club, UV-light parties with LED balloons and beer, and beautiful Sunday garden parties with picnic essentials.
2. New-age digital interface: This concept aimed to bring friends together through a digital interface that included gourmet food, augmented reality, party games, and more. Each attendee received a physical box containing food, alcohol, and fun, along with a digital package to make the 60-90-minute call memorable. This was tested across four cities, with 40 participants and 5 MVPs, focusing on virtual celebrations designed to create shared digital experiences. Each call was hosted by an MC who conducted games and activities, with food from popular F&B chain Social and beer from the brand 7 Rivers.

Challenges and Learnings

In addition to findings from our pilot prototypes and tests, we also developed scaled-up business plans and models as the next stage, which helped build an understanding feasibility and viability of the ideas in more detail.

Results from the project were presented to the senior leadership at AB InBev, and our learnings informed company strategy in the digital events and services space—especially regarding the desirability and feasibility of phygital experiences.

Our work laid the groundwork for AB InBev to explore partnerships with platforms and vendors and assess the scalability of these concepts.

Organising remote experiences across cities and delivering food and beverages during Covid-19 was a significant challenge. Additionally, many of the concepts we experimented with were quickly reaching their peak of adoption, and trends were declining just as fast. In a rapidly changing landscape and with fatigue from staying indoors, before AB InBev could adopt these concepts at scale, consumer behaviours seen during the pandemic began to reverse and behaviours such as revenge shopping (another trend that had been identified in our forecasting excerise) started to emerge.

The project, however, reinforced our belief in the importance of real-life experiments, lean pilots, and the merits of working closely with our client to understand the desirability, feasibility, and viability of a solution beyond just the concept level.