CASE STUDY · COINTREAU · STRATEGY
A decade of digital strategy with Cointreau.
Channel architecture
Ongoing
Customer journey
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
Retention
Quarterly review
Shipped
Adjusted
Next cycle
Mapped
Sequenced
Reviewed
Client
Cointreau
Industry
Premium spirits
Service area
Strategy
Engagement type
Retainer
Started
2016
Status
Ongoing
01 — The brief
A heritage spirits brand with global distribution and the operational complexity that comes with it. Multiple markets, multiple CMOs over the years, multiple platform changes, and the ongoing need for a digital strategy that ties everything together.
The challenge isn’t whether good strategy is possible — Cointreau has talented internal teams, strong agency relationships, and the budget to do things properly. The challenge is whether the strategy ships — quarter after quarter, year after year, across leadership transitions and platform migrations and the natural drift that affects every long-running marketing program.
Most agencies that come into this kind of account ship a deck and disappear. We were brought in to do the opposite.
02 — What we did
Long-term digital and CRM strategy, refreshed across major cycles over the decade. The work covers the full breadth of how the brand operates digitally: how prospects discover Cointreau, how they convert, how they retain, and how the brand stays culturally relevant in markets that move at different speeds.
Customer journey design — mapped not as the idealized funnel from a marketing textbook, but as the messy, branched reality of how real people move through awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention across regions and product lines. Channel architecture decisions about which channel owns which part of the funnel, where channels hand off, and where the brand stops trying to do everything everywhere at once.
KPI frameworks that translate marketing performance into language leadership can act on. Roadmap and sequencing — what ships first, what waits, what gets killed because the team can’t execute three things at once. The unsexy alignment work that prevents the post-strategy “how do we know if it worked” argument.
Quarterly strategic reviews with marketing leadership, run consistently across the decade. The strategy doesn’t end at delivery — it gets adjusted every quarter against what’s shipped, what hasn’t, and what’s changed in the market or in the org.
03 — How the engagement runs
Retainer-based since 2016. Strategy work feeds directly into execution we deliver alongside — CRM program work, analytics infrastructure, web operations, and CRO. The whole engagement runs as an integrated program, not five disconnected service lines.
We’ve worked across multiple CMOs over the decade. Each leadership transition is a moment where most agencies churn out — new CMOs typically want their own partners. We’ve stayed because the strategy keeps shipping and the institutional knowledge doesn’t fit on a transition document.
04 — What changed
“
Quarter after quarter, year after year. It didn’t sit on a SharePoint waiting for someone to remember it.
The relationship itself is the proof. Most agencies churn out of premium accounts in 18 months — we’ve stayed for ten years across multiple CMOs and multiple platform changes. The strategy work has compounded: each cycle builds on what was learned in the last, rather than starting from zero with a new agency every time leadership changes.
What that buys Cointreau is operational continuity that’s hard to replicate. The team that scopes the strategy is the team that delivers the execution. The institutional knowledge — what was tried, what worked, what failed and why — lives with the work, not in a transition deck.