The Heineken Story by Barbara Smit

Author:Barbara Smit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile

10

Losing Its Fizz

Pete Brown was a young planner at Lowe Howard-Spink, the British advertising agency, when he was asked to rethink Heineken’s advertising in the United Kingdom. In the late ’90s, the agency was no longer consistently using the strapline that made the brand famous in the UK. Heineken was going through a process of intense soul-searching, and the agency figured out that it had to make a statement: either bring the strapline back or ditch it completely to embark on another ground-breaking campaign for the Dutch brand.

It took Brown and his research team four months to go through thirty years of beer advertising, read the consumer reports and examine current trends in the beer business. Their conclusion: the ‘refreshes the parts’ strapline was exhausted, made no sense in the increasingly global lager market and ought to be replaced. On the back of this brief, a few months later, a new campaign hit the market, with a strapline that still echoed the success of the previous years: ‘How Refreshing. How Heineken.’

Unfortunately, that same week, an updated version of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations came out, as Brown recalled. Among the new entries was ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’, described as one of the most successful advertising lines of all time. Later that week Brown said he received a phone call from Frank Lowe, the agency’s chairman. ‘I’m going to play golf all day tomorrow with the chairman of Heineken. He’s going to ask me a couple of questions, so I just need your help,’ Lowe said in a suave voice, in Brown’s version. ‘I am pretty sure he is going to ask me why we’ve ditched the most successful strapline of all time […] Can you go over that tonight and think about it over your fish and chips?’

The awkward exchange was indicative of the brand’s disarray in the United Kingdom. Lowe and a few other advertising people felt that their campaign hadn’t got tired, but there was no denying that, around the middle of the 1980s, the Heineken brand was losing its impetus in Britain, barely keeping pace with the unfaltering rise of the market. The brand that had fuelled the Lager Revolution in the ’70s suddenly appeared to be losing its fizz.

The managers at Whitbread could identify quite a few reasons for the pressure on the brand’s market share, and one of them was clear for all to see. Heineken commercials, which had broken the mould of beer advertising in the ’70s, were no longer so unique. A flurry of other beer brands had taken a leaf from Heineken’s book and were grabbing market share in the ever-growing British beer market with their own witty advertising.

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