I have worked with several lager labels and time and again I was given a task that would pit against the brilliant branding efforts of Heineken. The truth is, many beer labels aspired and have taken Heineken’s branding innovations as a benchmark to challenge for. But in reality, Heineken has proven itself to be one that is not only very innovative, very alternative, very adroit, but very consumer driven. The key to it’s success is that it seldom pulls off it’s stunts based upon the traditional approach of passive brand persuasion. I would like to emphasis once again, that they take their consumers VERY seriously. Here are a few of the branding innovations Heineken adopted over the course of their campaign periods. Lately, their campaign, ‘Your Future Bottle Challenge’, would leverage on crowd-sourced content form fans all over the world to create the winning design for their future bottle. And the results of the winning design would be a fresh print on a limited edition packaging featured in 2014 to give the classic logo a new look. See? Once again, they placed their fans BEFORE everything else. Atop of all these, another winning formula to note is that the brand itself has a lot of collaborations with companies out there which allow their consumers to either benefit in terms of convenience or appeal to them in terms of visual aesthetics. I strongly believe to place your voice in the hearts of your consumers while constantly working with new partners to create innovative work is something that should be inherent in almost any successful brand strategy. Lastly, it is imperative to be innovative, constantly challenging what you have done before and making groundbreaking work through innovation and creativity.
Zack Chia 