The challenge

At Heineken, consumer understanding and closeness have always been a key imperative for business success, and with a new CEO in the driver’s seat this thinking only got reinforced. Each year, the brand organises ‘Commerce Week’, a global event to highlight the previous year’s successes, and present the next year’s projects within the company. For the 2020 event, Heineken was looking for a solution to do the following:

• Bring consumers closer to the business during ‘Commerce Week’, by showcasing consumer movies in presentations to illustrate existing knowledge and hypotheses
• Facilitate consumer connect interviews during ‘Commerce Week’

The solution

Since 2016, we have partnered with Heineken through the Innovators Brewhouse Square, an ongoing consumer community of more than 500 members across 15 markets. The community provides a continuous pulse on consumer attitudes, behaviours and emerging needs, helping teams explore new ideas through consumer immersion, concept testing and communication development.
For Commerce Week, we activated this community in two ways. First, consumers captured their beverage habits, routines and motivations through video diaries, bringing everyday consumption moments to life and adding rich context to existing knowledge. Second, we facilitated 50 live online Consumer Connect interviews, enabling Heineken stakeholders from around the world to engage directly with consumers in their own environments. These conversations created a unique opportunity to move beyond assumptions and experience consumer perspectives firsthand.

The impact

By creating direct connections between employees and consumers, Commerce Week became more than an internal event. It became an opportunity for teams to see the people behind the data.

The combination of consumer immersion and live conversations deepened marketers’ understanding of consumer needs, motivations and behaviours.
More importantly, it strengthened empathy across the organisation, reinforcing a consumer-centric mindset and helping teams make future decisions with greater confidence and human understanding.