Stravito helps Heineken obtain best-in-class insights

Heineken, the Dutch multinational brewer, has cemented itself over the last 160 years as one of the world’s leading lager companies, now delivering over 25 million servings of the flagship Heineken brand across 192 countries every single day.

With the help of Stravito Heineken recently launched its new two-year evergreen strategy, focused on shaping the future of beer and beyond to win the hearts and minds of consumers.

“As part of the evergreen strategy, we wanted to reimagine how we share insights across the organization, making sure that we put consumers at the center of everything we do,” said Louise Fitzpatrick, global CMI capabilities manager at Heineken. “One key way to do this is by democratizing knowledge, and giving those in the organization better access to consumer data, insight and everything we learn about our customers.”

HEINEKEN operates as a decentralized business, with over 90 operating companies located all around the world with local teams and insights professionals on the ground. The small global team in Amsterdam provides guidance and access to tools to help the local operating companies run their business more efficiently.

“We’re actually a very decentralized business,” explained Louise. “We often found that we were speaking different languages and, we in the center, saw this as being a real pity because people were doing great work but nobody was seeing, sharing or discussing it, and often there was duplication across teams.”

Heineken’s key objective with Stravito’s Knowledge and Insight Management platform (KIM) was to create one version of truth and encourage a culture of sharing across an aligned ecosystem.

It’s been a year and now all work the insights team at Heineken completes is communicated via KIM.

“KIM is now very much the normalized way of sharing insight,” added Louise. “It’s not through email. It’s not through teams. We guide everyone to KIM.”

Heineken has a number of consumer-inspired Innovation Platforms that will guide the business and its longer-term future, according to the company.

“When creating KIM, we wanted to make our existing research work harder. That meant limiting the amount of research we required, said Louise. “Previously what we would have done is launched a project that aimed to uncover one specific innovation opportunity, involving X amount of focus groups, in X amount of markets, starting from scratch. But I said to the team, 'We have KIM. We have so much knowledge here.'"

For more information about this news, visit www.stravito.com.