Heineken’s Edelweiss fusing specialised ingredients with localised marketing strategy

Edelweiss, a wheat beer that uses Alpine herbs, was first launched in South Korea in 2018, but only more recently entered several other markets in the Asia Pacific region including China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia.

According to Heineken Premium Beer Global Brand & Marketing Director Marcelo Amstalden Möller, many of the launch activities for the brand were hit with various challenges due to being hit by instabilities amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is only now when life is returning back to normal that the firm has decided to go big with its latest Alpine Spirit campaign to push Edelweiss’ growth even further.

“As it is, Edelweiss is actually already seeing significant growth in the various markets it has been launched in – it is showing one of the strongest rates of growth in our portfolio based on its smooth taste, unique design and strong communication strategies in place for it,”​ Möller told FoodNavigator-Asia​.

“But we know that there are even larger opportunities [for the brand] and want to be able to bring the Alpine experience to even more consumers, so we conceptualised this Alpine Spirit campaign to bring highly-recognised influencers from the various markets to the Alps so that [two forms of\ marketing could essentially be done in parallel – the influencers created content from there and shared this with their followers, and we also filmed the various experiences there for the campaign.​

“We also realise how important it is to localise the content for consumers in the various markets, so apart from the influencers’ own content creation – such as livestreaming for a Chinese audience – we also had five different scripts of the stories we wanted to tell, and shot these six times with the six different local celebrities to best appeal and be the most relevant to the various local audiences.”​