Marketo presents: Ask the CMO
Will Heineken USA’s
newly imported Brazilian
CMO be the brand’s next
‘legendary’ leader?
Sold in 178 countries, Heineken is a global brand
with a global marketing challenge: How do you
create location-specific content while also telling
a coherent brand story from Belgium to Burundi?
Heineken U.S.A. CMO Nuno Teles grapples with that
question — and its possible solutions — every day.
IMAGE: MASHABLE
COMPOSITE: CHRIS MINESES
Imported this year by Heineken USA from Heineken
Brazil, where he was the company’s vice president
of marketing, Teles has bolstered Heineken’s longrunning global campaigns like “Legends,” helped
introduce new viral hits like “Champion the Match”
and led initiatives to mine for data and trends that
fuel the more than 250 brands underneath the
Heineken umbrella, including Dos Equis, Amstel
and Desperados, a new tequila-flavored beer.
Q&A with Nuno Teles,
CMO of Heineken U.S.A.
Mashable sat down with Teles at his new
perch in New York to talk about how the
brand tracks consumer behaviors, how it
speaks to beer (and cider) drinkers around the
globe and why a bold and relevant message
is still paramount to brand marketing.
Heineken is sold in nearly 200 countries;
how does the brand stay location-specific
while maintaining a unified message?
It’s about having the right combination of global
assets that can be locally relevant and a very
clear brand positioning statement that people
understand. At Heineken, our brand asset is “be
a man of the world” — to believe that in order to
progress, you need to go beyond your comfort
zone. in order to progress, you need to go beyond
your comfort zone. That helps us operate in a
consistent way even when we explore other assets.
For example, our current Champions League
campaign is being broadcast in the U.S. and on
online video. Then, we have what we call “local
topspin,” which is a challenge to the US consumer.
Would he like to back to work in the afternoon, or
would he like to go to Barcelona? If he wants to go
to Barcelona, he needs to convince his boss to go
with him. This is going beyond your comfort zone,
and this is how we believe we can operate with
local relevance in a country while following our
global assets.
How has Heineken looked at consumer
behaviors, and what observations and
behaviors has it incorporated into its
marketing, design and product?
We have identified three mega-trends that influence
what we do with our core brands. They first is the
“Mexification” of America — how the U.S. is impacted
by both Mexican culture and the demographics that
are driven by the growth of Mexican consumers.
That significantly impacts our creative ideas
and how we market Dos Equis and Tecate.
The second trend is flavor promiscuity, which is
driven by the fact that seven out of 10 consumers
want to try new flavors. That supports the
work we want to do with cider, specifically the
Strongbow brand. We know the business that
cider stimulates sources from wine and soft
drinks. It’s incremental to the beer business.
The third mega-trend is the shift to “best” — the
acknowledgement that millennials are more keen to
choose top quality than a friend’s recommendation,
which is quite bizarre in this digital world where
a Facebook recommendation would be the
best and most important choice. This is the
reason why we’ve been very successful
with our “Best-Tasting Light Beer”
campaign with Neil Patrick Harris.
How is mobile playing a role in Heineken’s
marketing efforts, and how does a brand tell a
consistent story over all of its social channels?
We don’t look at digital in isolation. We look
at three Ss. The first is science. We ask what is
the science? What are the insights? What is the
knowledge I have about my consumers?
The second S is the story. What is the story I can
create based on those insights? What can I say
to the consumer that I know will be relevant.
The third S is the speed in delivering that
story. Nowadays, digital allows us to connect
with a significant amount of consumers in
a very speedy way. With our “Best-Tasting
Light” campaign, we reached out to 37 million
people in three days using only digital.
You can’t look at that in isolation, though. I would
look at that in the context of what’s the big, bold
idea that I have. I need to have something interesting
to say, and that needs to be grounded in insight.
IMAGE: HEINEKEN USA
in order to progress, you need to
go beyond your comfort zone.
How do you measure the impact of your
marketing organization on the company? Do
you feel like you can connect your marketing
programs to revenue growth? New customer
acquisition? Ongoing satisfaction? Retention?
Nowadays it’s all about winning within the
repertoire that consumers have. We’re not
talking at all about penetration or reaching
out to new consumers. Now we know that
on average, a consumer has 12 brands in their
repertoire, so it’s all about how can we be the
brand they prefer within their repertoire.
It’s all about the behavior of the consumer
and linking the communication to sales lift.
The ultimate measurement, I would say, is the
base volume lift that that can generate. The
path that leads there is to have top creativity,
delivered through a very competitive media
plan. I need to have awareness and the shadow
voice that will make my communication
competitive. That should trigger brand
consideration, trial and, ultimately, sales lift.
If I had to choose one, though, I’d
choose the ability to change consumer
behavior through incremental sales.
What are the economic benefits of engagement,
and how can they be measured? How do
marketers persuade their peers in other
functions to care about engagement?
If you don’t engage the consumer, you’ll never have
a consumer change their behavior. Engagement
is a way to start influencing a consumer. If they
don’t feel engaged with the communication,
then there’s no point in reaching out to them.
With Dos Equis’ “Masquerade” campaign, for
example, we made an online video and TV spot
that portrayed the “Most Interesting Man” and
announced the party he’d have in his mansion. The
activation we did was around an interactive video
where 47 million consumers interacted with the
video for 2.5 minutes. That is true engagement.
Making sure that amount of consumers will
interact with you for that amount of time is huge.
What are some of the challenges of
forming a relationship with your customer
when you’re disconnected from them
because you sell through stores?
The way we stay connected to the shopper and
consumer through the wholesaler and then the
retailer is to have a good understanding of our
shoppers and our potential consumers and to see
how they behave. Who buys our brand? We now
have ways to use data from our shoppers to find
better and more efficient ways to sell our beers,
which are also relevant to the wholesaler and
retailer. We bring path-to-purchase initiatives to our
marketing initiatives and it helps us stay connected
to the shopper, even through a three-tier system.
How does Heineken reach fans on their
second screens and how does Heineken
make sure fans have a positive association
with the brand on social media?
Nowadays, the question is: Is TV the first screen,
or the first screen a mobile screen? I believe
everything is going mobile and that if we can
develop something that’ll work effectively, in mobile,
it’ll be significantly more successful. In all of our
campaigns, we have a strong mobile component.
Both the “Masquerade” and “Best-Tasting Light Beer”
campaigns were designed for the second screen.
In another campaign, we had guys who were
confronted with a challenge at lunchtime — do
you go to Barcelona to watch the Champions
League game, or do you go back to the office
and watch it? You have to decide now though.
It’s a great way to deliver a relevant message
while you’re using a second screen.
For the Desperados brand, we deliver the message
through social. We found that in the states where
we used social, we reached 23% awareness. In
states where use TV, we reach close to 0%. You
start to see that if you want to reach millennials in
a pre-party occasion, digital and social start to be
significantly more effective media than the TV is.
Where do you see marketing heading
in the next three to five years?
I see data and science driving marketing moving
forward. We’ll extract insights from consumers
and know more about them and what drives their
behavior. The way we do research will not be the
same. It will be a transformation moving forward.
Then, the creativity will continue to be
paramount. The bar will be higher. The demand
to have better creativity will be there.
We will also acknowledge how speedy
things are; how fast you can deliver a
message. All that is fantastic. For marketers,
it means we are facing exciting times.
Why having a message and delivering
it is still paramount for marketers?
If you have the media, but you don’t have
the message, it’s a waste of resources. If you
have a great message — that’s grounded in an
insight — but you don’t deliver it, that’s a missed
opportunity. You’re basically not able to reach
out to the right consumer at the right time. It’s
a combination of the three Ss. If you have one
S, but not the others, you’ve missed the point.
It’s great to have great, bold campaigns, but if
it isn’t grounded in insights and mega-trends,
then you’ve again missed the point; you don’t
know what will drive change in the market.
The last thing is that you need to deliver
that in a sophisticated, social, digital way.
Nowadays, that may well be the only
way for you to reach the consumer.
HEINEKEN’S VIDEO RESPONSE TO ‘ODYSSEY’ CRITICISM
creativity will
continue to be
paramount.