Bourne Identity: the Lager That Went to Hollywood in Search of a New Image

It’s not easy to make your beer stand out when drinkers can’t tell it apart from others. Andrew-Murray Watson talks to the boss of Heineken

Jean-Franois van Boxmeer, the Belgian chief executive of Heineken, is a big James Bond fan.

“I grew up with 007,” he says. “I have all the films at home.”

But Van Boxmeer would prefer it if we all curled up at home with a lager (Heineken) and watched another action hero – the rather more gritty Jason Bourne.

Heineken did a special promotional tie-up with The Bourne Ultimatum, the third in the trilogy of films starring Matt Damon. It was just one of a number of steps taken by the giant Dutch beer group to move its brand upmarket.

In the UK, Heineken has been seen as cheap and not altogether cheerful – a lager for football fans before a match and a poor relation to the likes of Stella Artois, Kronenbourg and Peroni.

But since Van Boxmeer took over in the top job in October 2005, he has focused on restoring the image of the drink.

“I have been putting people back to work and selling beer. It is about achieving results and becoming a winning company again,” he says.

Of course, his staff were selling beer prior to Van Boxmeer taking over; Heineken hadn’t become that dysfunctional. However, poor growth compared with rivals SABMiller and InBev had left the brand looking a bit flat. A licensing agreement under which Whitbread make Heineken in the UK didn’t help; unlike other Heinekens around the world, the British-brewed lager was not premium strength. But since the end of that agreement in 2002, performance has improved.

In the past two years, Heineken has done better under Van Boxmeer’s leadership. In the last year in the UK, industry figures show that sales grew 19 per cent, compared with an overall decline in the premium lager sector of 2.8 per cent.

“We had a licence agreement with Whitbread to make Heineken at 3.8 per cent alcohol in the UK. It was a fairly good beer, but the positioning was cheap and cheerful. Circumstances led us to put an end to the Whitbread deal and import Heineken back into the UK at 5 per cent strength.”

Part of the strat-egy that has led to an improvement in the beer’s performance, both in the UK and in other key markets such as the US, has been giving managers more personal responsibility.

“Our people can now claim success for themselves,” says Van Boxmeer. “We have installed a share scheme for our top 400 managers around the would so people can share in the company’s long-term growth.”

This Anglo-Saxon approach is a stark departure from Heineken’s traditional Dutch way of working, which places an emphasis on making decisions based on consensus. Van Boxmeer says this has led to the group moving away from its Dutch roots to become a genuinely internationally structured organisation.

“This has helped in the speed we can make decisions,” he adds.

Half of the executive committee who run Heineken are now non- Dutch.

But Van Boxmeer and his team face a number of challenges. Competition in the global beer market is intense, and industry watchers expect further consolidation. Heineken, according to its boss, sees itself as a consolidating force rather than an acquisition target.

Then there is the problem of rising prices for the raw ingredients that go into beer. Barley is trading at record levels after a lousy European harvest caused by extreme weather conditions and the trend towards growing arable crops for biofuels.

But such issues aside, the main problem for executives in the beer industry is how to persuade consumers to opt for one lager over another. In a blind tasting it is nearly impossible for 99 per cent of beer drinkers to distinguish between different brands. So the challenge for Van Box-meer is not just to motivate his workforce and keep a lid on costs, but to give drinkers a reason for choosing Heineken rather than another identikit lager.

Heineken’s boss has an encyclopedic knowledge of brewing history and the mating behaviour of yeast that borders on the nerdish. But after a lifetime of making beer around the world, it is perhaps to be expected.

“At the turn of the 20th century, it was a competitive advantage to have the right brewer. Now everybody can make a decent beer. At Heineken we have our own yeast we grow in our own labs. We still pay tremendous attention to making the product as good as we can and we still we do a lot of research and development to make shelf life better and to make other marginal improvements. But because these technologies are readily available, the battle is now about what the brand represents.”

The key, he adds, is to persuade consumers that they can see “something of themselves” in the product.

And there are still innovations in the way the product is marketed that Van Boxmeer hopes will give Heineken an edge over its rivals. These include the DraughtKeg, a mini-keg of lager that is sold in the supermarket and delivers the perfect pint at home. A new worktop-based beer tap product is soon to be introduced in the UK to transform the kitchen into a fully functioning pub.

Hence Heineken’s renewed efforts to associate itself with Hollywood movies. We are more likely to drink Heineken, apparently, if we think that Jason Bourne drinks Heineken. That the action hero’s preoccupation with dispatching his enemies and driving cars extremely fast leaves him very little time to enjoy a quiet beer is neither here nor there.

The company also sponsors the European Champions League and the Heineken Cup, Europe’s premier club rugby competition.

Football is cool, rugby is cool, Jason Bourne is cool. Therefore Heineken must be cool. That’s the theory, anyway.

(c) 2007 Independent on Sunday, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.