The Heineken BrandPortal: Top Marketing Gun for 2011 - www.smallworlders.com

The Heineken
BrandPortal:
Top Marketing
Gun for 2011

www.smallworlders.com

Nielson Norman
Top 10 Intranets
It’s that time of year when the doyens of web usability, the Nielsen
Norman group, publish the Intranet Design Annual 2011.

The report is the intranet equivalent of Top Gun: the place where
only the ‘best of the best’ get their name on the plaque.

And (cue drum roll and muffle natural modesty) we’re made up
that a high flyer from our growing hangar of clients has reached
the top ten this year.

Well done Heineken. Your marketing intranet is fast and accurate
for every individual, but you’ve never forgotten the value of team
work. And that’s what every marketing Top Gun needs from their
intranet.

So why has it become this year’s most famous marketing
intranet?

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group
“Heineken’s BrandPortal gives worldwide users quick access to brand assets on a colorful
site offering an ever-growing array of collaborative features. Features such as Heineken on
the Web, which presents a snapshot of what customers are saying about the brand on
Twitter, blogs and YouTube, take the site beyond the ordinary.”

20/20 Vision
The Heineken BrandPortal works because the vision is crystal-
clear. It works to solve two typical, if complex, problems faced by
all dispersed marketing teams. They are:

      1.         Promoting a single brand message in 170
       		        markets across the world.

      2.         Delivering value-adding collaboration and
      		         across dispersed teams.

The tightly locked targets, listed in order of their importance, really
matter. All 2700 portal users – the brand managers who create
things, the local marketers who use them, and all the agencies in
between – know what this intranet is for.

It’s not ambiguous. It’s explicit, clear and leads to better choices.

Nielsen Norman Group
“The site is highly designed, with bold colours and graphics throughout, which sets it apart
from many intranets. This was done intentionally for the target audience of people working
in marketing. This is not an intranet to find human resources policies, but specifically
designed for marketing and brand materials.”

The need for
speed - Part 1
Every year Heineken runs a user survey. As “social intranets” are
all the rage, we expected Heineken’s users to ask us to unlock
some of our shiny new social features.

But they didn’t.

The portal wasn’t broken, it didn’t need wholesale change, but it
could get better: easer to use, more accurate and faster. Users
just wanted to get in, grab their stuff, and get out.

It’s a rarity: an average time on site engagement metric that can
be too high.

We took three steps to speed up the search for content.

    Faster Navigation
    Thanks to our analytics, we know the most popular parts of
    the BrandPortal. Adding a range of quick links speeds users
    to the popular destinations.

    Better Navigation
    Heineken’s marketers look for campaign content and assets,
    so we simply tightened that relationship between navigation
    and campaign.

    Faster Search
    The old search box delivered results by type; the new search
    box delivers a Google style list of relevant terms: the way the
    users want it.

Giving users what they need makes a big difference to an
intranet’s usability but, even more importantly, its usage.

Lifting the
brakes…
Poor tagging and labelling puts the brakes on content searches.
We made it quicker and easier for Brand Managers to do this
necessary evil.

Design is another delicate issue. Marketers reject poor, or non-
existent, intranet design but, if it’s overdone, function becomes
the victim and users fly off course.

All the Heineken content creators use a standardized design kit
– with templates, skins and guides – for easy design of new
content.

As a rule we update the design to reflect new campaigns
materials because the BrandPortal’s look and feel is part of the
overall message.

Collaborative
intelligence
The secondary Heineken focal point of collaboration and
communication is growing, in terms of investment and
participation.

Heineken’s Trade Marketing Platform is just one flagship
development; bringing together a defined, but dispersed,
marketing team to share “bottom-up” ideas, experiences and
feedback to improve future content and assets.

Heineken has avoided flying into a classic intranet trap: it uses
collaboration features to support an existing community; it
doesn’t build collaboration features and expect a community to
emerge.

We don’t build communities: we support communities.

The need for
speed - Part 2
One problem facing every intranet team is the speed of marketing
and technical change. Heineken’s experience provides three
lessons to any ambitious marketing intranet:

  •     Respond to your fast-moving user demand
  •     Publish your content regularly
  •     Blur the barriers between the internet and your intranet

Many intranet teams manage the platform in-house and
outsource the content. That’s not the Heineken way: they take
care of the content, and we manage the platform.

It makes sense: jet paced social media is driving technical
change on your intranet at a speed beyond the scope of an
over-stretched in-house IT team.

Heineken relies on our Sandbox platform for a customized
marketing intranet platform that stays ahead of the breakneck
development curve.

Mark van Iterson, Manager Global Heineken Design & Concept, Heineken
“SmallWorlders are continuously adding new features, and are happy to develop more
specific custom elements for us when required.”

The toolbox
Here are just a couple of features we’ve rolled out for Heineken
that show how the best of the internet can be adapted for your
intranet.

    Heineken on the Web sucks in brand chat and allows
    marketers to follow the sonic booms on Twitter, YouTube or
    different blogs.

    The Dropbox facility helps users dispatch oversized
    marketing files across the world that would otherwise stay
    grounded.

These tools provide huge value for all Heineken users and give
them access to valued and trusted internet technologies, inside
their BrandPortal.

The results
So how successful has Heineken been in its bid to establish
brand control and foster collaboration?

For the asset sharing focus, it sounds like mission accomplished.

    “We have successfully compiled what was once a
    disparate collection of asset systems into one site,
    with a single login and search for all of Heineken’s
    brand and management assets. As a result, we’re
    more efficient and the single source ensures a single
    brand worldwide”
    Mark van Iterson, Manager Global Heineken Design & Concept, Heineken

For the collaboration focus, it sounds like we’ve caught the
tailwind.

    “Every day you can go there and see new pieces of
    inspiration or interesting activations that have been
    spotted and uploaded from around the world. It’s
    fascinating to browse. For a globally dispersed
    organization, this kind of thing just can’t be replicated
    in any other way. It’s a real asset.”
    Mark van Iterson, Manager Global Heineken Design & Concept, Heineken

Kind words indeed. But you don’t have to take Heineken’s word
for it. As far as the usability experts at Nielsen Norman are
concerned, the Heineken BrandPortal is already Top Gun for
2011.