Mint Marketing Awards recently, Deepika Warrier, chief marketing officer at Diageo India, said that though research agencies were not able to put their teams out to track consumers, the company spoke to its customers through virtual groups and one-on-ones. “We were really depending more on our own observations of ourselves as consumers, our friends, our community, and what little market visits we could do to understand what’s happening," she said.
They observed that permission to drink grew. Drinking was no longer as much of a taboo as it was earlier. “It suddenly became far more central to family get-togethers, smaller, more casual, intimate gatherings," Warrier said.