Heineken, you could do better than this !!!

Heineken is one of my favorite brand, though I am not their target customers and also do not drink beer at all. Each year, especially the time near holidays, I am excited to watch their advertisement on TV. I really love the combination between the creative content they create and the music they use in each TV commercial. It is really attractive and also impressive. However, Heineken still made mistake in their “seems-to-be-perfect” TV commercial. The typical example is one of their latest advertisings that I watched when I was in Vietnam.

We could find that drinkers in the ads come from different countries and are portrayed with different typical characteristics. The campaign shows that the company has seen the increase in multicultural buying power and what Heineken did here is trying to take advantage of multicultural opportunities which remain underleveraged and underfinanced in targeted and total market platform. That could be seen when they target customers from diffirent cultures including marginalized group such as Asian in their ads. In their casting, we also could see their attempts to bring the image of people from some specific countries into their commercial to make their TVC becomes familiar with some such group of customers. Moreover, they also show that they realize the importance of insight in making TVC to align better with the values, culture and the tradition of population they trying to reach. This could be seen in the way they emphasize the legend of all their drinkers in the ads. Another success of Heineken is that they have eliminated their limitation in sending their media messages to customers from different groups by not using any specific languages in the ads. However, people could easily realize that the images of characters here is a typical example of stereotypes.

In this post, I want to take a deeper look at the part of the TVC with the image of a kung fu assassin. I think that in this part, the target population of Heineken is the Asian in general, not the Chinese only. However, what they portrayed in the TVC is the legend of Chinese which is not really familiar with people from many Asian countries. As an Asian audience, I could bear no resemblance to this part. I find that Heineken failed to address the cultural awareness in this part because they did not corporate the values of their target customers (the Asian culture in this case) in their ads. The root cause might come from their unawareness of the Asian cultural value. Additionally, I have met a lot of people who think that Asian people are mainly as the same as Chinese which comes from the stereotype of people about Asian people. That might be the reason why Heineken only use the legend of Chinese in this ads, which eliminates a large number of their target population as Asian people. By doing this, the effectiveness of their TVC in reaching Asian customers reduces significantly.

Heineken seems to have no choice in correcting their mistakes in this ads right now. But what is more important is that they should never make this kind of mistake again if they do not want to lose their position as one of the most popular beer producer in the world. How could they maintain that position when they keep eliminating a large part of their customers? It is necessary to know and understand about your customers, but it is much more essential to understand deeply about them when you aim to specialize your advertisement to a specific group of consumers and maximizing the effectiveness of the ads. If Heineken want to address the message of "Open your world" as what they use in their slogan, the understanding of the real different worlds of customers is the first thing the company should keep in mind. Moreover, it is impossible for the them to target many groups of customers in one TVC. They might think about producing seperate TVC for specific group of people so that they could avoid both stereotypes of a big group and the wrong portrayal of their customers group. By doing that, the connections between the company and the underrepresented group will be strengthened which might create more brand loyalty. 
Nowadays, we have much more opportunities to approach different kind of customers and make profits from that. We are living in a multicultural society and I think that you don’t want to lose your own chance just because of the basic mistake: being unaware of the culture of your target customers.