AB InBev: Product Development for Global Beverages

How do we create more value for our vendors to help increase sales?

We worked with AB InBev, the world’s largest brewery, to support in-house teams along end-to-end design journeys to develop new products and services for their key markets.

If there’s an organization that understands consumer behaviour and consumption, it’s AB InBev. However, after being tasked with a significant increase in Points of Consumption (PoCs) in Europe, the Trades Team reached out to Treehouse to support them in correctly applying design thinking to four challenge areas.

To significantly increase volumes sold in European PoCs, the Trades Team knew that they needed to incentivize more bars, hotels and restaurants to showcase their products.

We ran four, 10-week projects on Sprintbase, providing weekly coaching sessions for teams. This guidance and support enabled AB InBev teams to conduct market research, uncover novel insights, develop and rapidly test new prototype solutions across seven European markets.

Here’s an example of one such sprint and its outcome:

How might we provide trade programs that solve real problems for our bar owners?

Through their research the team uncovered two key insights:

1. 1. Bar owners feel like their primary competitors are those in close proximity.
2. 2. Bar owners constantly struggle to find new occasions to attract people to their venue.

They generated a variety of new ideas, which they tested and iterated. One idea they took forward was to create a series of occasions and events to help local bars differentiate and attract new customers in the area (strategically rolled out to ensure regional uniqueness).

These original events were then piloted and iterated across Belgium, Spain, Germany and France.