Heineken: UK Beer Market & Evergreen Strategy
Former Senior Regional Executive at Heineken
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Former Senior Regional Executive at Heineken
Interview Transcript
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Regarding the autonomy that the OPCO teams have in general, not specifically for the UK, but in general at Heineken, how much autonomy do the OPCO teams have in terms of the direction they want to take, such as innovation? You mentioned pack sizes and pack size innovation. How much autonomy did you have, and what do you think the teams in the UK have today?
Much less than before the previous tenure of the former CEO, for good reason. It has changed. I think there's much clearer guidance from the center in Amsterdam for the top companies. The UK is one of the top five in the world in terms of size and profit. The regions in between historically consolidate numbers and execute the strategy.
This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.
Regarding the autonomy that the OPCO teams have in general, not specifically for the UK, but in general at Heineken, how much autonomy do the OPCO teams have in terms of the direction they want to take, such as innovation? You mentioned pack sizes and pack size innovation. How much autonomy did you have, and what do you think the teams in the UK have today?
I believe there's a real goal from Dolf, which I think is the right approach, to drive one strategy across the board called Evergreen. This strategy is to be implemented within the regions and all the countries. From that perspective, there's a target provided top-down from the center to the region. Simultaneously, the region receives a bottom-up input from countries. This is when the budgeting process for the year occurs, typically in Q2 and Q3.
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How would that compare if the ABI guys were looking at it? How many people would they have instead of 800?
At the time, I would say, based on my benchmarking, they had a different route to market with distributors focusing on a few big accounts. The ratio was about one to five in sales, meaning for every five reps we had, they had one.
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