Heineken's secret to brewing a better brand!

Hi, everyone. Great to be here and spend a few minutes with you. Just sharing the short story, I think, about how we evolved the brand at Heineken. There's one or two issues with the slides. That font should be bigger, by the way. I'm not testing your eyesight and hopefully everything after this will work too. But just to tell you a little bit about myself, I've been with Heineken now for about two years, just over two years. I'm based in Amsterdam, part of the Global Talent and Leadership team, where talent acquisition is quite a new center of expertise. I'm the second person to do the job, and I think that's probably a reflection of where Heineken is at when it comes to talent and talent management. Many of you, I'm sure, will have seen the adverts, the brand adverts, the Heineken beer brand adverts, and the sponsorships, and it's pretty flashy, right? I think a lot of money has gone into that. Some famous people. The one that I always remember is Jose Mourinho on the roof shouting at his dog before the Champions League game. But internally it's not as. It's a bit more traditional than that. At the end of the day, it is a brewing company and it's a traditional brewing company. And it's been working for a long time with managing talent internally, not so much of a focus externally. So actually the. The concept of employer brand and communicating to external talent is relatively new. As Jonny said, it started off with really the first Go Places campaign, which was about 2015, 2016, and it made a really big impression. Before Heineken, I worked in Switzerland for Nestle. I was in a similar role at Nestle. And I can be honest and say virtually every single HR director or regional HR director came to me and said, ben, can't we do something like this? This looks so great. Can't we do something like Heineken are doing? And at the time, I said, hey, give me the money and I'll weave some magic. But obviously, when I got to Heineken, I thought, well, that's expecting big budgets, big prioritizations. Wasn't really the case. I think the Go Places was launched to great fanfare and there's some great data from YouTube about the popularity of one of the videos I'm going to show to you. And it was the most popular video in Europe for three months, which is a manifesto video. So it's pretty incredible. A lot of these stats went like this. They kind of came straight up a really steep spike and then they just went down like this and then. And then sort of bubbled along close to zero for. For the rest of the time that they've been there. So it was. It was a challenge, I think, for me to really, you know, where do we go from here? How do we create a brand, evolve a brand rather, that is as compelling, as exciting, but it's turned on all the time that it's not just an inspirational spike. And this was the real. The real challenge. I have to nod when I want the slides to be moved on, so if you catch me nodding, that's what I'm doing. This is a little bit about Heineken. Let's not go into too much detail, but it's a big global brewer. It's got about 85,000 employees. We have about 75 OPCOs operating companies all around the world. We do operate in some fairly remote areas, like Burundi, like Haiti, like Papua New Guinea. We've got breweries in all of these places. Attracting talent to come and work for them is quite challenging, as you would imagine. I don't know. If you're not in the beer industry, you probably won't know what millions of hectare litres is, but we make 233.8 million hectolitres. I can tell you. That is a lot of beer. You could not drink it. It's a huge amount. And we're relatively split across our four areas. Europe is our most mature region, as you would imagine. Heineken is a. Is a big Dutch company, some very strong Dutch roots, but we're growing certainly in Asia Pacific. It's our smallest, but one of our fastest growing. America's been, typically, has been very big because our two biggest OPCOs, Mexico and Brazil, are both in, obviously in the Americas. AME is Africa, Middle east and East Europe, which I think is Russia. And I'm looking at my Russian colleague here, and it's a slightly strange region in that sense, that it tags a big country like Russia onto it, but that's where we are. The point in this is that it is a very decentralized, very highly autonomous organization. And this is one of the key factors when you're developing a global employer brand. In a company like Heineken, you only have so much control. You don't have control over execution. You have to create something that is compelling enough for all of these different OPCOs to want to use. So really, it's like an internal sales platform. We need to engage our internal people and create content that's great. Enough for them to actually use. We can't tell them to use it. That's the structure of the Heineken organization. So some of you may have seen Go Places before. Just show a quick, quick video here, Hopefully, and then there's no sound. Who's seen this video, by the way? Just a show of hands. Quite a few people have seen. I've seen the video. Well, we don't really need the sound. I can just narrate over the top of it. This was Go Places, one that came out 2016. You can see it's pretty high production value. It talks very much about Heineken being a place where you can go places, both internationally. This is the point where he talks about some of the different locations that we work in, the types of roles that you can have within the organization, all of the extras. So not this guy here, the main character, but everybody else are employees. But that was Dolph juggling beer bottles in the corridor. He's now our APAC vice president. I have never seen him juggle beer bottles in the corridor before. And be honest about that. And this was kind of where we're going with this. This is my point that I'm making is that this looks great, right? I don't think anybody can challenge that. But how real is it? There are employees in the videos, but they're not saying anything. There was an interview. This is still live, by the way. We've not replaced this. You can go on to interview and prospective candidates would go through an interactive 12 stage interview completion. It was about 70%, which is pretty good for something that takes 12 minutes to complete. And it was, it made a big impact, like I said. But then when I came to Heineken and the task of evolving the brand landed on my table, it was then asking, right, how do you move this great brand? What are the real internal perceptions of Go Places? And if we can move on one more slide, this is really what we then heard. So then this is a case of fantastic external feedback. But the internal feedback was not so good. People liked it, don't get me wrong, but it didn't really touch the buttons for them. This is some of the feedback. We're a big global business, like we've already said, but it felt very European. This main actor is an English guy, he's a professional actor. Also felt very graduate focused. We hire about 12,000 people a year in Heineken globally, but it's only about 250 of those are graduate positions. So then why are we making a global Employer brand focused on the vast minority of our hiring. Also a bit staged, like I pointed out. That's Dolph juggling beer bottles. It looks great, but very staged. It's not real. And actually the platform that they built, the interview, had quite limited localization. So what we had then was almost a static global platform that opcos and remember the context within which this is being built. OPCOs are very autonomous. They couldn't really do much with it. They couldn't really pull it and use it in their day to day recruitment, marketing efforts. They couldn't really localize it too much. The localization options, as you can see here, Tiger is one of our beers that comes out of Singapore and it's one of our international beers. But then if you're recruiting in Asia, then they could have Tiger there. But if they're recruiting in Italy, they would have Beer and Moretti there. That was the sort of limited level of localization. But they wouldn't really actually be able to pull it and use it in any kind of day to day operations. So it was big, it was aspirational, it was flashy. People externally liked it, but internally not so much the case. So that then really became the. The challenge. That really became the challenge as to how do you then evolve a brand that resonates internally more than it does externally? Because we know that that's where a really strong brand comes from. It has to be authentic and if we can push on. This then really became the focus of the evolution of Go Places, which we called go places 2.0. We didn't want to rename it, we didn't want to get rid of the terminology Go Places. It had made an impact. People knew it, People did refer to it internally as well. So we kept the tagline Go Places. But this is where we focused it. We wanted to really be more authentic with real employees, real stories, real people, not actors on videos. But we also wanted it to be more transcendent as well. And this was our second pillar. And what do we mean by transcendence? This is really meaning more to more people. So that if you're hiring a brand manager in Singapore, the stories that the stories and the videos and the employer branding content that we're developing is more recognized by prospective candidates. That they don't look at it and see that looks European, that looks too far away, it looks too aspirational. And we wanted it to be, to be real to each individual candidate that could potentially see it and apply or apply and then consume the content as per bill. Borman's message yesterday and with more customization and full localization. So again, we can really start to embed the branding content into the daily recruitment marketing operations. So how do we go about this? Real stories, sounds great. How do we get them? We're sat in this lovely office in Amsterdam by the canal. Our businesses in places like Burundi and Mexico and Papua New Guinea. How do we get these stories? What do we do? And it really then became, we realized at this point, it really then became this project more about internal engagement. And actually the power of the brand was more about engaging our own employees internally. And we had confidence that if we did that in the right way, then the final product, what we would then position externally, would work as well. But this was the absolute key. We were relatively lucky in terms of our timing because we'd just gone live with Workplace internally as an internal collaboration tool. And I think they're here somewhere today. If you're not looking at Workplace, then I would suggest you go look at it because it's a great tool, especially Facebook internally. And we launched an internal engagement campaign. We got Chris, who's our chro, to lead it. We created a nice video. I can't show it to you because it's got lots of Hollywood movie clips in it and somebody might sue me, so I can't show it to you. But it was about a minute and a half long and really set the scene for asking employees about what it is that makes them passionate. Tell us your moments, tell us your great experiences. And the hook to the employees was that, of course your story can become a video. We can make you famous was kind of what we said to them. We didn't quite phrase it like that, but that was really the message. So we started posting a lot of this content internally. We have every employee in Heineken who's on Workplace. This video on the left hand side still remains our most popular piece of content posted on Workplace globally since we've had it. So I think There are about 35,000 views of this video. You can see a few of the comments and shares up into the hundreds. And it really made a buzz. I remember sitting down for lunch in the HQ and people were talking about this at the. At the same time. Have you seen that video? Are you going to submit your story? You know what, what options have you got? It really started to create somewhat of a buzz. You can see here, there were some comments that were added. We gave two different options to employees. If they were brave enough, they could share their stories. Actually, in the comments box here. If not, then there was a separate SharePoint site that they could basically fill out a form. So some of them were just memories, right? We received almost 400 different responses from employees. Some of them were just memories, but some of them were really exciting events. And then of course the hard work started because you get 400 responses. But how do you then bring that down to 35 individual stories, which is what our target was. And it really was a monumentous effort by the team to basically shortlist down to 180. And then we telephone interviewed 180 people against a set criteria. This is what we're looking for. It was almost like a competency based interview, right? You know, you're kind of, you know what you're looking for. You have your competencies, you kind of have a proficiency level. And as you're interviewing these employees, asking them to bring their story alive, you're kind of scoring each one. And at the end of the time that we did this, we came up with short list of 35 individual stories. We did lots of sort of hard non digital campaigning as well within the offices. So without the sound. Here's an example of some of the videos and the content talking over this. What we wanted these stories to represent was really the core behaviors of the organization. What really works well at Heineken. Heineken calls itself entrepreneurial, and a lot of the people are definitely entrepreneurial. It really is a company where if you've got a great idea, you can just make it come to life and you can succeed and people will see that and appreciate that and your career will develop. So that's really what we wanted the number one single point within the employer branding to be about, is that we want people who will grab the bull by the horns and make something happen. That's what works at Heineken. It's true, we know that that's what we like. That doesn't always work for others, those that are looking for really strong processes, really strong structures, really strong governance bodies to gain approval. And once you do, then you move on. That just doesn't exist in Heineken. What works is, it's a bit chaotic, I'll be honest with you. And if you can find your way through the chaos and make something happen, then that will equal success. And this is really what we wanted to represent is individual stories of employees who did exactly that. So every video always ends up with something like this, a statement, you know, ready to inspire others with your passion. Because that's what Jasmine did. And of course there's always a link here to apply to search and apply for jobs. Of course, because we want to link this back to the careers site. So I don't think the other video is going to play. So if we skip forward. So we built a separate website as well because we had now all of these digital content, about 35 employee stories, about 45 seconds each one, which is great for campaigning on social. You know, they're bite sized pieces of content. You can use them on LinkedIn. OPCOs can do that at a local level. We did also do it at a global level, but we also wanted a home for all of these content as well. So we created this interactive platform. The reason that it's doors and it's white is that if you, if any of you have seen the first go places, which is the interview that I referred to previously, the looks and the aesthetics are very similar. You go through the door to take the interview. So the idea here was that actually if you miss that door to take the interview, but you keep going, you will see lots of other doors and behind each one is an employee story and an experience that we want to share with you. So there's actually a long line of 35 videos counting each day. This is Andre Ku's day 3283 within the organization. You simply click on this, go through into the door and you get the video content always ending with that statement, ready to make a difference, ready to turn nos into yeses and then always a link to search and apply. And this site was also quite localized. The video content could be subtitled, the language was available in whatever the OPCOs wanted. So we worked individually with them to build a very local site. The deep links to the careers site would go to the local careers site. So it was much more flexible and worked for them a lot better than the first Go places. So nice videos, nice website. Did it make a difference? The answer is yes. This is just after one month. We had just over 15 million reach on media and 2.2 on social. We did put quite a bit of campaigning behind this, working with our corporate communications team to really engage with different media outlets to make sure that everybody was aware of what we were doing. And it was quite a collaborative project. I should have said at the beginning as well that we partnered with the Heineken Global Brand team to develop the content. They played the role of consultant, I would say, and it was a very collaborative project across global Heineken Brand corporate affairs and obviously the global HR team. There may be some KPI measure people in the audience. So just the next slide, if we can move on the next two slides, in fact, just show a little more about what our impact was. So this is just about reach and volume. This is our LinkedIn careers page. I think we're at about. So it's a little old. I think we're about 860, 870. This campaign really boosted it. We attained a quarter 25% increase in the time that we launched, which was at the end of January, and I think this was taken in August. So within that time period, we increased the volume of followers by 25%. And then this is, of course, then engagement. And in a decentralized company, we don't have the privilege of being able to really attach our branding efforts right the way through to quality of hires, because it's not centralized, it's decentralized. The measurement of quality of hire exists in every single opco and we have 78 of them. So at Global, how we measured the campaign was, yes, about volume. We wanted the Heineken employer brand to be out there, so that was a relevant volume. It wasn't just vanity, but also engagement as well. And you can see here, in the time that we launched in January, it's just grown exponentially. And that's really about using this branding content, reflecting it as authentic, and utilizing the platforms like LinkedIn to really, really bring it alive. So that's all I wanted to share with you. I think really the final message that I would give is that the secret of this is very much about internal engagement. It's very much about engaging with your employees and giving them a platform to really speak both into the business as well as outside of the business. Actually, as part of the internal launch campaign, we had a separate internal versus external. The internal launch campaign. The employees who were participating in the videos, their stories, they were the ones who were actually posting on Workplace to the rest of the Heineken world about their experience and their memories. So it was really nice to get the employee to own the content themselves and to almost sell their story and their idea into the business. And this got some great responses. We wanted to see the comments at the bottom of this, like, you know, oh, I remember that, Ben. That was a great day. What a super project. I remember working on that with you. This was really also almost the untangible or rather unmeasurable KPI that we looked at, which is about employee engagement. And that happened in virtually every video that was posted internally. So focus on your own people. It's got to be authentic, it's got to be transcendent. If you're in a big global business, you can't just have one linear view of employer brand. It's got to mean more to more people. And that's the journey that we've been on then since January. So great to share it with you. If you have any questions, happy to answer them.