Heineken:

The Challenge:

The Heineken brand is an icon within the beer category and has always enjoyed healthy growth.  With a new generation entering the category, the brand needed to ensure that it maintained its leadership position with a point of view and a global brand narrative that connected to this younger cohort’s values and beliefs.

Butterfly was engaged to collaborate in evolving its positioning to foster relevance and meaning with consumers in the competitive beer category.

The Approach:

At Butterfly, we believe in the power of emotions. A brand that elicits genuine emotional responses—whether it makes someone smile, cry, or raise an eyebrow—has truly connected and created a memorable impact. This connection drives salience, purchase intent, and loyalty, ultimately leading to sustainable, profitable growth.

Our approach to this challenge involved balancing cultural nuances with global relevance and strategic rigor. We harnessed our CODA tool and framework, placing emotions at the forefront, using creative and projective stimuli to tap into the raw, emotional System One part of the brain. It helps un understand consumers at a deep fundamental way and enables us to build guidelines on cultural nuances and narrative storytelling.

We launched an extensive consumer and category insights programme through our digital platform, The Hub, delving into the lives and values of nearly 150 consumers across 11 markets.

The Impact:

From this research, we distilled four potential insight themes, which we refined into two distinct pathways for Heineken. These pathways were developed through collaborative working sessions with Heineken’s team and their agency partner, Le Pub.

The insights provided the foundation for defining a fresh positioning and purpose for Heineken— centered around its distinct DNA.

This unleashed the full creative force of LePub, who brought home 22 Lions, with 1 Gold, 7 Silver, and 14 Bronze, at Cannes in 2023 surpassing its 2022 tally.