The Perfect Serve: Driving Sales With On-Trade Mystery Shoppers

Why the Serve Is a Brand Problem

Launching a brand creates opportunity, and it creates an execution problem at the same time. You need to know quickly what is actually happening at the point of sale, or you lose sales you never see.

The presentation, the head, the glass, the coaster — together they make up the perfect serve. The brand designs it; someone else performs it. In practice that means a bartender, working at speed, who may not have the time, the training, or the right materials to deliver it as specified.

That gap costs money — and in this case the cost is measurable. Across the venues audited in this programme, outlets executing the serve correctly recorded sales 60% higher than those that did not.

Which raises the practical question: how does a brand find out whether its serve is being executed across thousands of venues it does not control? Here is how AB InBev did it.

Checking Compliance Through Mystery Shopping

Following the launch of Corona on tap in pubs and bars across the UK, AB InBev needed an efficient way to verify perfect serve compliance in as many venues as possible. Checking an entire on-trade estate first-hand is slow, and for most brands simply not feasible.

We sent our European community out as mystery shoppers to order the product in a bar near them and photograph what they were served. Three questions per visit:

• Was the beer served in the correct glass?
• Did the bartender serve it with a wedge of lime?
• Was the lime wedge positioned on the rim?

Scale: mystery shoppers visited 4,000 on-trade outlets across the United Kingdom.

Photographic Evidence, in Real Time

Each mystery shopper photographed the glass as served and submitted the result through Roamler's online portal — dashboards covering the key KPIs, location-level data and photos, and full reporting behind them.

The point of the photos is speed. A compliance score tells a brand something is wrong; a photograph tells them what. A sample of real submissions shows the range of what showed up in practice:

Compliant

Non-compliant

Compliant

Non-compliant

Compliant

Non-compliant

The Results

Working from the reports, the sales team identified the venues where the serve was failing. Those results went to the sales managers responsible for each outlet, and the venues were revisited for a second check.

Across the programme, compliance reached 76%.

The commercial effect showed up in the comparison between venues. Outlets serving Corona correctly recorded sales 60% higher than outlets where the serve was not executed to specification — the same brand, the same market, the same launch period, separated only by how the beer reached the customer.

Watch the Story

Warren White, AB InBev, on why the real-time data and photographic evidence made the difference in launching Corona on tap.