Heineken Case Analysis

ISSUE STATEMENT Heineken is one of the world’s leading brands and has been for over 130 years. They are the number two imported beer in the United States, the number one beer in Europe and have a global network of distributors and 115 breweries in more than 65 countries. These are some great statistics for their industry, but in an ever-changing market where there is little brand loyalty they are fighting for every single beer purchase. They’re aiming for sustainable growth and trying to be a broad market leader in the industry. They need to expand and optimize their product portfolio. They have the basis to do this because of their current expansion strategies. Heineken just needs to focus on growing while improving profitability.
ANALYSIS
Heineken has been noted as one of the key innovators in their industry. They embrace innovation as a key component of their strategy. They really carry that across all functional areas including production, marketing, communication and packaging. To attain their goals of growing while maintaining their profitability they will have to accomplish a few things. They’ve already showed initiative to streamline their management program. They reduced the number of board members from 36 to 13 and made clearly defined roles for each of those members. This was an important step because they realized they needed to speed up their implementation process. Fewer people mean they have the ability to make and execute decisions at a faster pace which is very necessary when they have to keep up with their fast paced market.
A few changes that would help the company would be to accelerate their top-line growth by becoming more efficient in their processes. If they keep low costs while doing this they should be on the fast-track to high-growth results. Along with low costs Heineken really needs to focus on the markets where they can have the majority numbers to ensure future success. They need to keep a global mindset and