🍻 CHEERS TO AN EVOLVING STRATEGY 

Beer you can eat? At the Heineken Maltiverse in Singapore, visitors can enjoy ‘malt’ in many forms: during a chef table dining experience via an interactive art installation and a malt-powered music maker (it turns sounds from malt into unique beats). There’s also the chance to become a draught master by participating in a pour challenge, with free swag for steady hands. Only until this weekend, tickets for the chef’s table (SGD $28) are sold out; the rest of the experience is free to attend with a booking.

💡 OUR TAKE

Heineken is booked—popping up again and again in this newsletter! Before the Maltiverse experience, we’ve seen the brand help Malaysian music lovers pair up and refresh their playlists, put Thai artists in the spotlight (and on the stage) at Bedroom Fest in Bangkok, turn laundromats in South Korea into all-night sports bars… after so much work, it’s only fair we unpack the brand’s latest activation in more detail… 

After volume growth fell in 2023, Heineken announced plans to boost marketing investment and unveiled The First Ahh—a global campaign that’s built on the idea that the first sip of Heineken can help separate work from play (agh from ahhh). Although centered around different passion points—food and football—experiences like Maltiverse and LaundroMatch bring consumers to spaces where they can get together, inadvertently creating surprising routes to Heineken’s core product and entrenching the product in more meaningful rituals. 

The First Ahh seems to reinforce further a key Heineken principle: unplugging and living in the moment. Remember 2023’s Ghosted Bar campaign for Singapore and Malaysia, which encouraged young people to ‘work responsibly’? On the other side of the world, the brand recently built on that with The Boring Phone—a limited-edition ‘dumbphone’ that doesn’t connect to the internet or social media. Citing internal research which revealed that 90% of UK and US Gen Z and millennials ‘doom scroll’ while socializing, it promotes face-to-face connection. 

Countless headlines have zeroed in on how Gen Z is looking to tackle burnout by finding a better work-life balance. That sentiment extends to SEA, where young workers are increasingly opting for more flexible working arrangements. While the behavior shift is rooted in the pandemic, it isn’t going anywhere: later this year, workers in Singapore will have the right to request 4-day weeks. It feels like Heineken is adapting its place in culture to reflect younger consumers’ shifting sentiments while reinforcing familiar and existing messaging.  

Of course, knowing what’s shifting is never enough. It’s what you choose to do with the insights that counts 💡. Get it wrong and backlash can ensue—just ask Bumble, whose anti-celibacy OOH ads were recently called out for a lack of inclusivity. You can see where the idea came from: young people are over dating apps, so why not acknowledge that position while ‘humorously’ reminding consumers of the value you offer? But it failed to take other factors, like diversity and the significance of celibacy that resonates with this demographic into account. 

On the other hand, with local craft beer demand and production growing in popularity, Heineken has gotten the wheels rolling in reinforcing the brand’s relevance against a highly saturated market. The Maltiverse experience shows how the brand is not only enabling a passion point but also creating an avenue for their product to be consumed rather than competing in the same spaces as their competitors—turning the act of drinking Heineken an experience in its own right vs just a normal night out.  

Adapting to changing consumer sentiments whilst making sure they’re capturing the sentiment accurately and then reinforcing a brand’s relevance in everyday life is not easy work—but it can be worth it when there is a bottle of cold beer waiting for you at the end. Heineken leverages unconventional touchpoints and brings marketing to spaces where it’s least expected, solving a pain point consumers are only vaguely aware of. How might you do the same?

For those of you born before 1997, ‘fax, no printer‘ is Gen Z speak for ‘undeniable facts I agree with’