In the same month that Heineken opened an “experimental” area for visitors to the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam, Jules Macken, the global innovation director for the group’s flagship brand, led Global Drinks Intel editor Olly Wehring through the company’s NPD process.
You’ve been with Heineken for almost 16 years, the last 16 months of which have been in your current role.
I’ve been in drinks my entire career. I started out in a wine and spirits company that was owned by C&C Group in Ireland. When I wanted to move home [to Ireland] from my position in the UK, I joined Heineken, where I moved around, but always in marketing. My position prior to this one was as global brand director for Amstel, another Dutch institution.
What’s always been interesting to me is looking to see how we can address consumer pain points and barriers and to see how we can look to innovate. I like to have a problem in front of me that I can find solutions for. For me, they’re always consumer problems first.
Your job title sounds quite overarching. Where do your responsibilities and priorities lie?
I’m the director of innovation for the Heineken brand. I work very closely with the director of innovation for the Heineken company, Sarah Maddock, who looks across brands, opportunities and categories.
We look at innovation in a couple of different ways. We want to elevate the fundamental experience around beer, making sure it’s beautifully served, treated and delivered to consumers, depending on moment and occasion. That can be in packaging innovation or ritual and serve.
We also look at how we can overcome the challenges that consumers might have for beer. With Heineken 0.0, for example, that’s meeting the needs of consumers who don’t want the alcohol but want a great tasting beer.
Another area of focus is fuelling exploration for consumers who are looking for more excitement. Just this month, we released one of our first limited edition brews out of the Heineken Studio, Mokum750 (below), which is a white lager that features coriander and citrus.
For us, it’s about working on those three pillars to always make sure we’re finding ways to better address consumers’ needs. We call it ‘quality socialising’; how people come together and how they connect over a beer. We look to do that in progressive and interesting ways.
How do you avoid diluting the core message of a brand as well-established as Heineken?
The history and heritage of the brand gives us the licence to operate from an innovation point of view. Heineken was the first brand to export at scale and the first brand that introduced new draught dispense systems. It was also the first brand to land in the US after Prohibition. So, we’ve been the first in a lot of things.
The next frontier for us is, having done wonderful things in communications, we also have the opportunity to push the boat out more to embrace the brand’s pioneering credentials. Let’s bring that to the brews and to the beer itself.
The original Heineken is known the world over and fuels the majority of the growth for the business. Heineken 0.0 is now in 117 countries and has been an enormous success for us. We see continued opportunity to grow, and to outgrow the category. We’re the ones fuelling a large part of the category’s growth. You should come and talk to me next month, when we can talk a bit more about some of the new things we’re doing on 0.0!
With Heineken Silver, 70% of the beer consumed in Asia is sessionable – it’s consumed with food and they prefer a beer with a less bitter profile. Silver is addressing that need for a premium, pure malt beer that goes well with food and still has a progressive brand attitude to engage with consumers. Silver’s been an unbelievable success in Asia, but less so in Europe. We need to be rooted in consumer needs, but Silver didn’t hit the mark in Europe as it has in Asia.
We’ve taken learnings from that and we’ll bring those with us as we look at what’s next for the brand.
What’s the process within Heineken for identifying consumer needs?
Overall performance gives us a baseline indication of how well we’re doing. We also look regularly at penetration, frequency and intensity – how many consumers are choosing to drink our beers and when are they choosing to do that?
When we start to see gaps, we undertake some qualitative research with different partners to better understand why those gaps appear. That helps us get closer to the problems that consumers face.
With 0.0, we partnered with Professor Spence at Oxford University to understand why the growth of the category wasn’t commensurate with so many consumers claiming to moderate. Around 78% claim to moderate their consumption, but the category has only grown by 4% in the last five years.
We unpacked that and found that the fundamental barrier to non-alcoholic beer was that consumers couldn’t find it. That’s something we can address through normal business operations. Also, there’s still a lingering taste perception barrier that we see with something like 0.0, but that’s legacy – ten to 15 years ago, no-alcohol beer didn’t taste great. So, we do a lot to give people the opportunity to try it.
The biggest barrier we found was that a social stigma still persists; people are a little bit judged when they choose a no-alcohol beer. You must need to choose a 0.0 rather than want to choose a 0.0! Draught is a hugely important area for us in normalising the consumption of non-alcoholic beer and overcoming that social stigma.
The use of additional researchers is really helpful to get under the skin and see why consumers do the things that they do.
But Heineken 0.0 works for those with an existing relationship with beer. What opportunities for Heineken have you identified with younger consumers?
You’re right – The people that drink 0.0 are the same people that will drink beer. For us as an industry, it’s really important to talk about that. There’s this suggestion that non-alcoholic beer is a way for us to drive a communication agenda for alcohol, which is demonstrably not true.
For younger consumers, we’re seeing a return to simplicity. They don’t want to be distracted by their phones, they just want to go to the pub and connect with friends over a beer. That’s one side of it. Then, for many consumers, their palate has become sweeter over time. We need to find ways to better address that palate.
We’re fortunate to have multiple brands that allow us to address different taste profiles. It’s about trying to understand what they’re looking for and how we can better meet that need, then considering whether that’s the right opportunity for the Heineken brand to go after.
Which consumer need states have you struggled to let go of for brand Heineken?
None yet! I’ve got good relationships with all the other brand leads. Besides, you don’t want your brand to jump around too often. Doing things that make sense for your brand is really important.
It’s relatively easy to pass over ideas that don’t make sense for the Heineken brand.
You opened The Heineken Studio in Amsterdam this month. Is this your innovation pipeline being played out in public?
The studio is a play space for us to experiment, to see not what might be for tomorrow but for the week after. It’s like a concept car – not everything is intended to be scaled and exist the world over. When we talk about getting closer to consumers and their pain points, this is a brilliant way to do that.
The concept has been designed to allow us to be faster, more agile and more responsive to the things that are going on. It allows us to test and learn in real time. Some of the things you’ll see in the studio are not terribly scalable, such as foam infusions that inject new flavours into a beer. That’s quite an involved process.
We call it a play space, but it’s a genuine innovation and learning vehicle, with a constant feedback loop that allows us to see what consumers are reacting to.
How much can you share about the current projects you’re working on?
Until they’re out, not a lot!
Non-alcoholic beer is a huge opportunity for us. But if you look at the current growth of the category, we as an industry aren’t doing a good enough job of addressing those needs. So, for me, that’s something that I spend a lot of time on.
