Reaching new heights with Scintilla
Insights that unlocked opportunities across a category
“By fully leveraging all of Scintilla, we delivered the edge our merchant asked for—and achieved double-digit growth.”
When their Walmart merchant asked Red Bull to help optimize the Energy Drink category at Walmart, the Category Advisor team rose to the challenge. They dove into Scintilla to examine the category from every angle, weaving modules and reports into a layered, interconnected overview of customer needs and patterns. They also used flexible Scintilla API feeds to deliver real-time insights directly to the merchant, building a feedback loop for sustained success.
Here’s how the Walmart Category Advisor Team at Red Bull gained deep, actionable insights from across the Scintilla ecosystem and drove improvements across the entire category.
The opportunity: Creating an edge for Walmart in the Energy Drink category
For last year’s modular relay, the Walmart merchant issued Red Bull a challenge: identify unmet customer needs in the Energy Drink category, then devise a strategy to exceed those needs and grow the category.
It was a tall order for a competitive space. While the category’s double-digit annual growth rate presents a sizeable opportunity, the numerous brands and retailers vying for an edge can make it difficult to grow market share meaningfully.
It was the Red Bull advisory team’s first modular relay in the category, and their fresh perspective could be an advantage. To solidify their understanding of the category, they set out to augment it with data.
The approach: Developing a strategy to drive growth with Scintilla insights
Since their mission hinged on meeting customers’ needs, Red Bull went straight to the source. They used Scintilla Customer Perception to survey Energy Drink shoppers at Walmart about their purchases. In addition to product-focused questions about brands and flavors, the survey asked where customers tended to look for energy drinks in stores.
Identifying a gap in the category
The survey responses highlighted a hangup in customer shopping journeys: 73% of customers reported looking for Energy Singles (individual cans, as opposed to multipacks) in the refrigerated Grab & Go section, but just 64% ultimately found them there.
Red Bull used Shopper Behavior to segment Walmart stores by the presence of a Grab & Go section, then created test and control groups within each segment. They found that the discrepancy impacted sales: in test stores with Grab & Go sections, Energy Singles sales lagged the control group by 6%, but that gap widened to 48% in non-Grab & Go stores. Conversely, multipack sales in Grab & Go test stores outperformed the control group by 7%, but by 49% in non-Grab & Go stores. The team realized that optimizing each store’s Energy Drink assortment according to its layout could help close the gap and improve performance for each pack type.
They refined their approach by adding new layers to the analysis, using Shopper Behavior Performance in Detail to segment customers by brand loyalty and store location. Then they used Shopper Behavior Assortment Deep Dive to outline how customers differentiated between products and made purchasing decisions, building a Decision Tree that would inform Walmart’s Energy Drink modular flow.
Revealing the biggest opportunity yet
The Red Bull team had made big strides in stores, but a close look at the Shopper Behavior Multichannel report revealed an even bigger opportunity online.
Ship-to-Home (S2H) and Online Pickup and Delivery (OPD) both represented about 18 times more opportunity dollars than In-Store. And with OPD customer penetration already at 3% (15 times higher than S2H), it could be easier to capture those opportunity dollars in OPD.
That meant that prioritizing OPD could accelerate growth in Energy Drinks. And to encourage online ordering, Energy Drink product listings needed comprehensive, high-quality content.
The team used Digital Landscapes to review the category’s catalog, recommending content upgrades for the brands and products with the most room for improvement. Within a month of implementation, the category Content Quality Score rose by 6 points to more than 90%.
Real-time data at their fingertips
Scintilla insights had helped the Red Bull team craft new strategies for the category. To keep new insights flowing in, they used Channel Performance and the Scintilla API to build a custom reporting structure that provided real‑time visibility into modular performance. Then they shared it with their Walmart merchant to establish a real-time feedback loop.
The results: A winning strategy built on broad Scintilla insights
Red Bull delivered the edge their merchant asked for: their recommendations helped increase OPD channel customer penetration by 2.4 points, contributing to a sales increase of 26% across In-Store and OPD.
The move, and the insights behind it, paid off. The fries and wings both became top performers, becoming the #1 contributor to growth in their respective categories. Each captured a sizeable digital audience too, with 32% digital penetration for the wings and 20% for the fries. Perhaps most significantly, each brought new customers to the Kinder’s brand: the wings contributed 70% incrementality to the brand, and the fries 50%.
The fresh strategy helped the category reach new heights, as Walmart’s share gains ultimately accelerated by 70%.
