How Heineken is Harnessing the Power of 1st Party Data With Relay42

Our biggest challenge is that we typically work for a portfolio of brands who are all about building brand equity and driving brand awareness and really creating meaningful brands. The differentiation point is that we don’t sell the products ourselves; we work with retailers and we work with partners that are invaluable to us. But having a way that we can connect the journey through different data points and different partners is the key to us being able to unlock great sales value. So the biggest challenge I have at the moment is really understanding how we harness our first-party data and how can we actually prove the value of investing in that capability?

We started working with Relay about a year ago, and Relay42 started off being really all about helping us build up our capability and helping us reach our goal of getting 8 million unique people identifiers by the end of 2021. So that’s kind of the broad remit in that space, but we needed to talk to a business of marketers who don’t necessarily have a background working with data, don’t necessarily see the value of working with data, and to be clear there’s so many different ways you can map that to value. Proving efficiency and effectiveness is what we need to deliver against, and Relay42 has helped us to kind of build that and understand how we can start small and scale up. So, it’s been a really good learning journey for us, and we’ve not cracked it, but we continue to test and learn and that’s where Relay’s been really important.

What I like about the Relay team is that they don’t come at you with the Relay business model and then try to shoehorn your business to match that. It’s been really collaborative, and we’ve explored those different ways of working and how we can improve processes so that it fits our business challenges from a Heineken perspective. Ultimately, we need to be answering to Heineken stakeholders, and the Relay team have been really smart at manipulating the model they’ve got that works, but so that it works for us. It’s good to see other brands and what they’re doing because as a CPG client we’re not as forwardly progressive in how we use first-party data as other industries like telcos and the travel industry, so it’s great to be able to get other people’s viewpoints. So that’s been fantastic.