The HeinekenBrandPortal: Top Marketing Gun for 2011

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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.”

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?

Nielson Norman Top 10 Intranets

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.

20/20 Vision

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.”

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.

The need for speed - Part 1

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

Faster NavigationThanks 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 NavigationHeineken’s marketers look for campaign content and assets, so we simply tightened that relationship between navigation and campaign.

Faster SearchThe 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.

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.

Lifting the brakes…

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.

Collaborative intelligence

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.

The need for speed - Part 2

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.”

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 toolbox

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.

The results