In today’s fiercely competitive beer market, brands are looking to push the boundaries with their marketing. Budweiser tried to reach out to the millennial’s with its mobile activated ‘Brewmaster’s Tour’, Stella Artois Black launched its classy ‘Black Diamond’ theatre experience and Corona introduced its ‘Sunset’ beach festivals.

However, the prize for most innovative marketing must go to Heineken.  The brewer has made headlines over the years with its increasingly innovative and immersive marketing campaigns that resonate with their customers and make them part of the brand experience.

The brand’s ultimate strength lies in its ability to adapt to a changing marketing landscape, and embrace new marketing trends and technologies, while relating to its fans on a personal level.

Pop-Up City Lounge

As part of their ‘Open Design Exploration’ programme, Heineken selected a group of talented young designers from major cities around the world, to join forces to create a pop-up lounge bar.

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In order to engage its audience with the experience and provide inspiration for the designers, Heineken invited its fans to upload images that represented their vision of the perfect lounge bar, on Instagram.

The crowd-sourced initiative proved to be a hit. Tens of thousands of user’s submitted images, which served as a source of inspiration for the designers, who then recreated the look and feel of the place that the ‘crowd’ would like to socialise over a beer.

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Featuring intricate ‘conversation cocoons’ and blended beer ‘hoptails’, the ‘Pop-Up City Lounge’ was a great example of effective crowd sourced marketing.

By inviting the public to get involved in the creative process, the project generated buzz and Heineken gained thousands of new brand ambassadors.

Crowdsourcing Tips

Social media has changed the way businesses engage with consumers—it’s no longer a one-way conversation, but a multiplayer experience that relies on collective, thoughtful engagement.

If you are looking to harness the power of the crowd, consider these three top tips:

1.    Be Clear

Keep your directions simple, focused, and not open to conjecture or opinion. Your audience need to know exactly what you want, or you’ll get results that won’t be on-target.

2. Keep Communicating

A lot of clients dump their creative briefs on the crowd and then disappear. To get the best results, make sure that you interact with the crowd – answer questions, provide insight and offer encouragement. Make your brand an active participant.

3. Plan Well

You may think that your assignment can be thrashed out in a short space of time, due to crowd’s huge numbers and apparent availability. However, you must give the crowd plenty of time to properly execute an assignment, or you won’t get the results you need, of the quality you expect.

Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.