MUMBAI: International beer brand Heineken data-mines micro-moments and consumer behaviours to make the most of its sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League, according to a senior marketing executive at the brand.

“Heineken is one of the most well-known brands inside that sport because it has been there for so many years,” Anuraag Trikha, global brand director at The Heineken Company, told the recent ZEE MELT conference in Mumbai. “Seventy eight percent of our consumers think that we are different from other beer brands and we also know that the Champions League fans switch and recommend Heineken,” he reported.

“We have a lot of big data which gives us a snapshot of our presence in one of the world’s biggest sporting events in 190 countries,” he continued, “and we sponsor it because there is scale there.” (For more on how Heineken is putting football at the heart of its marketing strategy, read WARC’s report: How Heineken achieved ‘relevance at scale’ for UEFA Champions League.)

In his view, big data is important but marketers also need the micro-moments and to really understand what people are actually doing in those small moments.

“We know that 72% of people watch the matches alone at home and it’s not their fault because (the matches) happen every Tuesday/Wednesday night, and football is weekend behaviour so that is a problem for Heineken,” Trikha said.

If seven in ten people are watching Heineken’s advertising alone at home then that is a problem for the brand in terms of sales conversions. Time zones present another challenge – 64% of Champions League fans are based outside Europe.

“We as marketers have to take into account all these variables when we create an algorithm. So we had to input these complexities into the advertising idea,” Trikha said.

“We are aggregating and listening to data, we go through Facebook and Twitter handles, we listen to people, and because we are in the business of sharing and football, we play it back to the audiences so we are becoming a bit of a publisher.

“In a nutshell, you need to understand how to take large amounts of data, take a passion point, put a brand lens on it, and push it right back to the audience because it is relevant to them.”

Sourced from WARC