Insight
With today’s society itself, more and more local Malaysian urbanites have gravitated towards imported and crafted beers instead. Gone are they days where they don’t drink “what their parents did” – which seems to be a repeatable pattern. Plus, with an ever growing competition amongst the Carlsberg beer brand, it’s getting more challenging where Malaysians are spoilt by choice.
But the challenge is how to win the first drink of the night for a premium beer brand like Heineken against its competitor?
Strategy
In today’s society, more so amongst the local Malaysians urbanites, they are ever increasingly looking for places or even new hangout spots around them to wind down after a long day. Along with their constant curiosity in spot hunting, moments such as these are the key.
Finding a hangout spot nearby used to evolve around Yellow Pages, a paper map, and a pay phone – not the exactly the most convenient solution! Evolving from papers and pens, and now, they are ever connected to a mobile device.
How could Heineken take advantage of this moving trend that Millennials do not put their mobile phones down? It’s not a secret they are attached to them. Given that they spend all their time with mobile media, it makes perfect sense for Heineken to tap into this light to win them on such moments, to drive the top of mind for the brand.
What the agency did was to drive the audience to the brand through mobile especially on words like “near me”, “closest”, and “nearby”. Such words are increasingly being used across the billions of queries from this device itself as consumers are ever searching, and till today, vast majority of it comes from mobile – 80%.
With the massive growth in mobile penetration at 140%; whereby Millennials have more than one mobile phone - it is a perfect solution for reaching out to them.
As a result, the consumer journey looks markedly different than it did only five years ago. It wants things right, and right away, hence a campaign based on ‘Open Your Cities’ was curated where it invited the audience to experience their city with Heineken in a new way, seducing them to explore the new spots in town.
Execution
Where next? That was a question that most of the audience were asking their mates when they are down at the pub, and Heineken had the answer.
Tapping onto this behaviour, Heineken curated a Twitter-based service to help the audience choose their next adventure, to what is the nearest hot spot in town. @wherenext Twitter-based service helped the audience to discover their city in a fun, enticing way.
To use the service, consumers simply needed to tweet @wherenext and geo-tag their location to receive recommendations for trending restaurants, events or clubs within their vicinity. The social tool pulls data from a variety of social media channels and analyses it to determine which locations are trending. With this in mind, the local Malaysian urbanites then joint together to curate local post and photos.
Results
More than 50 hidden gems across Malaysia were discovered where an audience of more than one million have contributed to the user generated Heineken map. Heineken was differentiated across the rest where TOM for this brand was the highest during this period itself. Winning them for the first drink of the night was prominently shown from sales figures as well, with an incremental 20% growth from this campaign.
The biggest success was Heineken has successfully convert 15% of Carlsberg beer drinkers to Heineken altogether, contributing to the overall brand health to 11%. Being premium and out of the market pays off with such innovative approach to mobile.