Heineken:

The Challenge:

In 2020, Heineken unveiled its EverGreen balanced growth strategy, prioritising profitability as a core objective. Positioned as a premium star within the portfolio, Heineken’s success was critical to driving revenue and profitability for the business. Thus, all eyes were on the quest to ignite growth, hastening the realization of EverGreen’s objectives.

Analysis revealed that Heineken was losing relevance with younger consumers, failing to resonate consistently across markets. Diverse perceptions of “who Heineken was” demanded a fresh, globally relevant, and adaptable brand positioning.

As the flagship brand of the Heineken business, Butterfly was engaged to reshape its positioning to foster relevance and meaning with consumers was essential to fortify its premium status in the competitive beer category.

As the eponymous brand of the Heineken business, evolving its positioning to drive relevance and meaningfulness with consumers would be the foundation from which to build world class creative to further drive its premium position within the 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 program 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, that even led to the definition of a new global tagline: “FOR A FRESHER WORLD”.

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.