“I should think that you Jedi would have more respect for the difference between knowledge and wisdom”, says one of the greatest researchers of all times, Dex Jettster, in Star Wars Episode III. We all know lots of things. However, that doesn’t make us act wiser or have more impact. Globally, the insights departments of companies are starting to feel this. It’s an effect of the Infobesity era. In times of Big Data, we’re knowledge rich but wisdom poor. There’s a veritable explosion of data. It’s often unstructured, messy and even contradictory. This can lead to decision paralysis.
This is a story of how Ipsos helped 1,400 marketers across HEINEKEN’s world to drive business impact. This wasn’t through feeding more information into their market actions. It was through taking existing information and reapplying it at scale. Creating a culture of Learn-Share-Reapply instead of reinventing the wheel benefitted Heineken marketing teams across the globe.
The Insight Awakens
Besides the Heineken beer brand, there are 300 other brands in The HEINEKEN Company’s portfolio. These cross different categories – beer, cider, malt, energy drinks, lemonade. Additionally, HEINEKEN is highly decentralized and faces a rapidly changing market (e.g. the rise of Craft, disrupting the beer market worldwide).
Another thing will strike you: how hard it is to drive efficiency and build successful portfolios equipped to win locally. To drive revenue, we couldn’t keep starting from scratch in every market. We needed to: 1) integrate teams 2) integrate knowledge and 3) reapply what works elsewhere, at scale.
#1 Integrating Teams
Firstly, we needed to build communities of practice for global and local marketers to learn from each other. Building a community is easy. The real challenge is making it meaningful. Not the geography, the category or the brand size would drive a real community feeling. Conversations with marketing directors told us what would: basing the communities on human motivations that are at the core of each brand positioning. By rooting brands in insights that aren’t category driven, but human driven, we made sure they stayed true to their positioning through every market activity.
#2 Integrating Knowledge
To equip the Heineken communities of practice with deep and universal insights that can mobilize consumers around the world, we needed to integrate masses of data. Ipsos created a global curation programme activated with 2 key pillars: 1) strategic curators for each region, appointed to distil, contextualise and connect the multiple data sources into meaningful, resonant and inspiring human stories. 2) An Insight Cloud to socialise and immerse marketers across the world with these powerful insights. The Insight Cloud has the mission to combine human and AI curation to display insights in a visually attractive way that makes engaging with research as easy as using social media.
#3 Reapply at Scale
A new marketing culture is being built, in which local subsidiaries don’t always strive to reinvent the wheel. As the need arises, HEINEKEN teams can easily access and get inspired by actionable insights to learn, share and reapply. In 2018 alone, brand managers generated a list of 218 actions – 167 of which were pure re-apply actions! For example, the Bourbon brand in La Reunion shared with pride the “Neighbourhoods” campaign of the Indio brand in Mexico, encouraging social tribes to build their own bottle label. Switzerland launched its very successful Retro line extension inspired by Slovakia, who in turn learned from Bulgaria and Serbia. Ivory Coast applied exactly the same consumer insight and brand positioning as the Walia brand in Ethiopia for the launch of the new brand Ivoire.
The Impact
We started this story by talking about wisdom that leads to business impact. Since 2016, curation has become key to all HEINEKEN’s topics related to category and brand building, portfolio strategy, crafting and launching innovation. And the numbers look good. HEINEKEN reported a 6.1% revenue increase in 2018. That’s the sign of a successful business and we truly believe in the contribution of the Learn-Share-Reapply programme to this success.
