Learn How This Intelligent Brewery Treats Customers Like Family

Swinkels transformed into an “Intelligent Brewery” in order to brew beer customers love.

Is it possible for a 300 year-old family-owned brewery to re-think its customer experience? If you’re Swinkels Family Brewers (formerly Bavaria Brewery) the answer is a resounding “yes.”

Swinkels employs over 1,500 and produces 26 brands of beer across the Netherlands, Belgium and Ethiopia. Available in 130 countries, Swinkels produces a staggering 7.5 million hectoliters of beer per year— or more than 2.2 billion bottles.

With an eye towards ramping up their digital strategy for 2020, Swinkels knew business opportunities were being missed and as a result, needed to re-invigorate their customer experience.

First step: Capture consumer data

After assessing its own marketing efforts, Swinkels realized they were already focused on the consumer by offering product samples at sporting events, for example. Unfortunately, they only captured anecdotal feedback with no specifics around consumer data.

“Our goal has not changed, we still want people to try our beers and to fall in love,” said Damian Bott, Swinkels Family Brewers’ Global Online Manager. “So we asked ourselves how we could digitize this, collect data without disrupting what was already working.”

Swinkels added sweepstakes drawings to their marketing arsenal where consumers could win VIP tickets to future sporting events. As part of the sweepstakes users had to fill out a simple questionnaire about what beer samples they liked and whether they had purchased Swinkels. For the group of people who liked the beer, but had never bought it, Swinkels offered cash back for their first purchase.

“This way we are able to stimulate purchase behavior in a relevant way,” said Bott. “It’s not about digital marketing, but doing marketing in a digital world.”

Swinkels soon expanded to other kinds of multi-channel campaigns such as having people deposit their receipts for beer in a special box in retail stores in order to win a beer fridge. Swinkels had offered these contests before, but didn’t capture any information. Now, the preference information being captured is routed back into the business to improve marketing and ensure their beer portfolio still resonates.

Creating an intelligent platform

The more Swinkels leveraged cross-channel campaigns, the more they realized they needed a single platform for activation, penetration, and loyalty. They wanted to connect existing touch points, create new ones, glue independent marketing actions together and turn unknown customers into known customers.

Swinkels turned to SAP for customer experience help starting with the implementation of SAP Marketing Cloud as the first piece for their “consumer interaction platform” which would ultimately also include SAP Sales Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Customer Data Cloud and be integrated with SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Leonardo, and SAP S/4 HANA.

Swinkels now has a better understanding of the entire customer journey regardless of touch point with five critical enablers at the fingertips:

1. Continue to meet consumers (online and offline)
2. measure and enrich consumer data
3. Stimulate desired behavior
4. Reward relationships
5. Create brand ambassadors.

By capturing customer data that includes personal, behavioral, and product-related such as purchase history and product feedback Swinkels has brewed up a holistic view of their consumers and can treat them as a part of the extended Swinkels family.

One of the most creative realizations of Swinkels “intelligent brewery” vision was the result of a design thinking workshop with SAP Labs. View the video demonstration here.