“A brilliant idea is at the core of any good campaign,” commented Soren Hagh, Executive Director, Global Marketing at Heineken International. He was speaking during the Cannes Lions International festival of Creativity on why Heineken has the thirst for creativity and why it values creativity. He was also accompanied on stage by Gianluca Di Tondo, Senior Brand Director, Global Heineken.
Heineken, that was named Creative Marketer of the Year at Cannes, has a strong believe that with demand for greatness comes great creativity. “We have a great believe that creativity starts with a decision. Unless you demand greatness, you wont get them. The key to success is delivering creativity. We also believe in great beer. There are many different ways of making beer, but we believe that good beer is at the heart of what we do.”
Stressing on the importance of creativity and what it has meant for Heineken brand, Mr Hagh said creativity is something that connects with the consumers. “Consumers are in charge. We need our consumers to pay attention to us. Creativity is a silver bullet that drives straight into the heart of consumers.”
One of the challenges that it experienced while staying connected with the local consumer was of the different designs and different culture that each of the 192 countries had.
“Beer is a local business. Different countries had different names, with different designs which wasn’t a challenge up until the 90s. In 2009, we embarked ourselves for a global positioning — ‘Open your world’. With this, we could have lost the local consumer. So, we then had a global platform through our ‘city’ campaign. Sixty different cities were used in this campaign,” commented Mr Di Tondo.
But its not always that even a brand like Heineken gets creativity right all the time. To understand creativity better, the brand came up with a creativity program. “We came up with a creativity program where we talk deeper on creativity. We realised that we don’t have a common language, so we set out to develop a universal language. The creative ladder is an attempt to understand and assess our creativity,” shared Mr Hagh.
