Liquor Legends has had an exceptional start to the year, and Vaughan Peters, National Trade & Marketing Manager, highlights a continued focus on loyalty and delivering value to both retailers and shoppers.
Q: How did Liquor Legends perform in the first half of 2025? What were the highlights?
Performance has been exceptionally good from a group level, we’ve managed to achieve positive (and extra positive) growth across all categories, and ahead of market. It’s quite pleasing to see these results, which can be attributed to effective planning from our category team and joint business planning, and just as importantly, the execution and support from our retail members.
Q: What do you see as the biggest opportunities for Liquor Legends in the second half of the year?
I’ll be cheeky and say, opportunities are self-created, and by that, I mean having a clear focus but not being ignorant to the industry ecosystem. Without giving too much away, there is a definite lean into cross-channel capabilities we are open to explore.
Q: Last year, Liquor Legends reached one million rewards members – how is the program continuing to progress, and what are your ambitions for the program in the year ahead?
Yes, a very proud milestone, way over one million Liquor Legends Rewards Members is an incredible achievement for our entire network. Of course, rewards and loyalty play a purposeful and bias role within Liquor Legends, and it is a tough one to replicate.
We have a strategic focus on loyalty and benefits to continually recruit into the program, that not only delivers commercial value to our retail members but emotional value to our shoppers. Ambitions are very simple – recruit and retain – and the investment into our resources shows how responsive we are to loyalty.
Q: How is Liquor Legends progressing with the expansion of its omnichannel capabilities, technology-driven personalisation and e-commerce?
For the second year now, we have taken the approach of openly sharing our eight strategic objectives in a forum with our trading partners, allowing planned alignment into the next financial year and beyond. The great news is the objective focus has not changed but been refined in some areas as we adjust priorities. Technology and efficiency play an obvious part in this, for greater business solutions for our retail members and trading partners.
Q: What are you looking forward to in the next 12 months?
Twelve months moves way too quickly in this game as we all know, and to be honest I’m looking forward to some level of stability in our market across all aspects – there has been a lot of shifting sands in the last 12-18 months.
Within our four walls, I’m looking forward to sharing our plans with our retail members at our national conference in September, and assessing the progress of these plans each quarter and hopefully sharing the successes this time next year.
This article originally appeared in the June-July issue of National Liquor News.