Heineken shares insights across business using new platform

Over the last 160 years, Heineken, a Dutch multinational brewer, has established itself as a leading lager company, serving over 25 million servings of the flagship Heineken brand across 192 countries daily.

The brewer has launched its two-year evergreen strategy, focused on shaping the future of beer and beyond. The Stravito enterprise insights platform has been central to this strategy, enabling Heineken to share all of its insights through its internally branded platform, Knowledge & Insight Management (KIM).

Louise Fitzpatrick, Global CMI Capabilities Manager at Heineken, said, “We see KIM as an integral part of our insights ecosystem, which is made up of a united collection of best-in-class tools and frameworks that help us ensure that every decision leads back to the consumer.”

Heineken operates as a decentralised business, with over 90 operating companies globally. The Amsterdam team provides guidance and access to tools to help local operating companies run more efficiently.

“We’re actually a very decentralised business,” Fitzpatrick said. “We often found that we were speaking different languages and, we in the centre, 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.”

A key objective with KIM was to create one version of truth and encourage a culture of sharing across an aligned ecosystem. The journey to finding the right platform wasn’t immediate, as the company was seeking out something quick and centred around AI.

“Some of the feedback I'm hearing now, which really inspires me, is from senior directors who would never have used CMI tools. They say to me, ‘KIM is amazing, I logged on and I just couldn’t believe the amount of stuff on there, it’s amazing, kind of like Netflix and I just kept going and going,’” Fitzpatrick said.

Heineken has a number of Innovation Platforms to guide the business and its longer term future.

“When creating KIM, we wanted to make our existing research work harder. That meant limiting the amount of research we required,” Fitzpatrick said. “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.’”

The team created a project on KIM that it was able to share with its innovation agency, including all of its most recent trend reports, and it ended up that the existing insight was enough and no new research was required, saving money and allowing the process to be completed quickly.

Image credit: iStock.com/bizoo_n