by Anna Gamboa
CANNES – With 41 Lions and a Grand Prix in the past three years, Heineken seems to be on a hot winning streak. But at their recently-concluded Cannes Lions talk at the Grand Audi, Soren Hagh, the premium beer’s Executive Director for Global Marketing and Senior Global Brand Birector Gianluca di Tondo say that Heineken’s secret is pretty much the same method their founder invested in when he wanted to make a good quality beer—by studying what makes a good product connect with its audience.
Creating the right culture, the right leader and brand didn’t just happen overnight, it was something generations of Heineken family members strove to instill in the company since it was founded in 1864.The 2015 Creative Marketer of the Year values great creativity because of a deep belief that greatness will only come to those who demand it, and to do this they collaborated on how they could make make more compelling content.
“We believe we live in a world where people decide what they want to pay attention to,” reflects Hagh. “The one silver bullet is creativity—the way it gets to your heart.”
Di Tondo adds: “You see the results not only in the awards…it generates an important currency: talkability. It’s critical for our brands to get the awareness you want –and sometimes [you’re] also paying less in terms of media.”
Understanding that in the digital age, Heineken needed to earn the respect of their audience, they paid attention to the brands and campaigns they handled over the years, and looked at their brand building framework—a fancy way of saying they needed to connect the dots to find a reason for their audience to engage with their campaigns.”Great marketing [still] starts at the same place, [from] the great insights of the consumer,” says Hagh, Creativity, according to him, is more efficient, and is backed by the numbers, not to mention the awards they’ve been getting.
That blunt instrument of the past, by hammering a message repetitively until the audience buys the product—doesn’t work anymore, according to Hagh. “Creativity isn’t just a way, sometimes it’s the only way.”
To get to powerful, impactful ads, Heineken isn’t afraid to make mistakes, because they quickly learn from them and move on. The creative risks are often worth the payoffs, since failures are viewed as temporary setbacks or stepping stones to greatness. And to improve their chances at success, the brand invested in a Creativity Program and developed a common language for creativity—the Creative Ladder—which measured how good an ad actually is. With 1 as the lowest or destructive, and 10 as the highest or “legendary”, Hagh says that 4’s (the clichés) are considered problems, and 5’s are considered positive territory for the brand—although their Holy Grail is a 7 (groundbreaking) and above. (8 means “contagious” and 9 is “cultural”)—which is what they aim for everyday. Di Tondo grins when he comments that it has engendered some healthy competition among themselves, pushing boundaries further. And that can only be good for Heineken.
Complacency is a dangerous attitude, Hagh thinks, and claims that Heineken is vigilant about arrogance and those who lean back—preferring those always on their toes. Di Tondo affirms Hagh’s points, and affirms that in the digital age, storytelling has become more important than ever before. High production values, design, and fine-tuning an integrated global platform are also elements in making memorable campaigns, especially now that they’re embarking on a campaign to make moderation cool for their consumers. But with their high goals, and creative ways of reaching them, anything is possible—especially with a brand that still leads in its category of premium beers and still has the widest geographical reach. Heineken may have the tag “open your world”—but it seems the real secret behind their success are the open and creative minds at work for them.
