Another round: How Asahi uses insight

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There’s a strong chance that, if you are a beer drinker, you’ve had an Asahi beer. The company, founded in Japan in 1889, is the largest in its home nation and the owner of numerous major beer brands worldwide, from Peroni to London Pride, and Grolsch to Pilsner Urquell and Asahi Super Dry.

Asahi stands among a beer industry that has seen immense change over the past two decades. Craft beer upended the market, with independent producers emerging to take on traditional breweries and lager makers. This was coupled with a profound crisis in the on-trade market, with around a quarter of British pubs having shut since 2000, according to the British Beer and Pub Association.

Years of austerity, a cost-of-living crisis and the pandemic have seen switches in consumption, especially considering liberalised off-trade reforms in the UK, which benefit supermarkets and other organisations focusing on the home market for beer. Globally, the beer industry has been hit, like many others, by financial pressures stemming from the war in Ukraine, particularly energy prices that have affected the production cycle, but also consumers’ spending power. Now, the rise of zero-alcohol and low-alcohol products pose another challenge; one the industry has generally embraced, with non-alcoholic alternatives a common sight on store shelves and in pub fridges.

Zuzana Heleyová is group strategy planning and insight director at Asahi Europe and International. She believes the raft of recent changes in the market have made it a fascinating industry in which to work.

“The changes in the past three years have been more visible than those over the previous 10 or 15 years,” she says.

“The one big change is on-trade; staying close to the house and limiting on-trade consumption as a consequence. Humans do change habits. People are not drinking more, but drinking better. Drinking better in terms of quality and looking for stuff that helps them moderate; zero per cent beer. This is quite a nice change in style.”

Brewing success

Heleyová is based in Prague and has worked for Asahi for more than six-and-a-half years. In her role, she helps to orchestrate and lead strategy planning at Asahi, making sure that processes align across functions and markets and that teams work as closely together as possible. The insight director role is part of her remit, supporting knowledge management across the organisation.

The insight team has seen a lot of organisational changes in the past year. A new structure incorporates group insight, which sits centrally and supports cross-market projects and the global Asahi brand, using knowledge gathered from all the markets in which Asahi operates.

Then there are local insight teams located in the various countries or regions – important for an industry that is determined by local market trends. “It is important to have people who are in touch with what is happening locally,” adds Heleyová.

To address this further, Asahi’s insight department has given data democratisation a huge level of focus in recent years. Beer consumption trends and consumer attitudes can be wildly different depending on the market, and there was a need to make sure there was cross-company access to insight reports and analysis to feed into more locally focused research.

The company established an insight library that acts as a one-stop shop for reports and analysis. The bank started as a repository for research at a more universal or global level within Asahi, but it has since branched out and now gathers research from regional and local projects. It covers a myriad of issues – from pricing development to the firm’s position versus competitors – and many of these are applicable to a large number of markets of differing sizes.

Full measures

Insight is at the heart of strategic discussion, helping to determine new products and markets on which to focus. Heleyová explains: “Insight is crucial in understanding the situation, both in hindsight (to understand the past and current situation) and, more importantly, to address the foresight – about future development. Asahi’s insight work incorporates internal and external data, and how these two link together.”

A broader part of the data democratisation agenda – and one of the priorities of insights at Asahi – has been increasing the understanding of the role of data in the organisation. One of Heleyová’s aims is to help staff at all levels understand that collecting data is the beginning of a research project, with insight, knowledge and action at the end point.

“If you are in the kitchen, you will first decide if you want to make a cake or a soup, and then look in your fridge for the right ingredients,” says Heleyová.

“It is like that with data. The role of insight is to transfer the data into actionable knowledge. It is not our role to confuse our stakeholders with confusing data.”

To do this, the team has tailored its approach to communicating research findings and experimented with new mediums for sharing insights.
“The ways we used to share insights in the past needed to be revised,” says Heleyová. “We often saw insight mistaken for data, which is wrong, or reports mistaken for insight.

“In a nutshell, what we are trying to do is find an effective way [of sharing research] for a specific audience – the way we share insight with young marketers is different from how we share it with senior managers in sales, or people dealing with the sustainability agenda. The focus is on
the stakeholders.”

They have also moved from what Heleyová terms ‘tell mode’ to ‘dialogue mode’, avoiding the use of PowerPoint or monologues when working with stakeholders. “We try to engage people in provocations or interactive sessions. If you are good enough, and provoke discussion and questions, it is much more impactful.”

The insights team has also experimented with podcasts to engage colleagues in the role of research in Asahi. “People told us that being able to listen to the learning is much more impactful than any other source of learning,” Heleyová adds. “Is it universal? Definitely not, but for some people it can be a good way to get the information.”

Local flavours

For a large global organisation spanning various markets worldwide, with very different levels of market maturity and consumer trends in each location, insight inevitably needs to work across national boundaries, as well as within nations and regions. That brings its tensions from time to time, but Asahi has worked to bring the different local insight teams together and have them pulling in the same direction. The insight function has teams based in places including Prague, London and Hong Kong, and employs 11 nationalities, requiring efforts to bring the function together as a team.

“What was a real game-changer for us was connecting the teams – when we created one Asahi Europe and an international insight organisation,” Heleyová explains.

The advent of Covid-19 ushered in an increasing focus on remote working techniques, which at Asahi has also helped bring disparate teams together across the globe. Virtual communication tools have also had a profound impact on the research techniques used.

Heleyová says that the main lesson learned from the switch to remote working during the pandemic, when face-to-face qualitative work was impossible, was that the team was “very comfortable” with a digital-first approach to interviewing and running research projects. This has helped and has been retained post-Covid, given Asahi’s global presence, the need for multi-market research projects and the diverse research team it employs, with staff in locations ranging from Canada to Hong Kong.

“We are also starting to use AI-based tools for speeding up qualitative work. For exploring some topics, instead of finding 20 people and talking to them in each market, we are doing much more AI work to understand specific topics before we jump to the people. We are also using unstructured data. If you are limited in the old approach to research, it can be a nice boost to us to find a more colourful and interesting way to deal with new stuff.”

Unstructured data can be very useful, especially in understanding new trends in emerging markets for Asahi. “The beer category is quite traditional, but, at the same time, it is a vivid category in certain areas and very local-specific,” muses Heleyová. “We started to use unstructured data for mapping segments that are changing quickly, specifically in markets where we do not have such a heavy presence.”

One example is in Canada, where Asahi has examined the growth of the no- and low-alcohol movement in the country. Canada is behind many other nations in its embrace of low-alcohol beer – for example, Slovakia’s beer market, according to Heleyová, has as much as a fifth dedicated to zero-alcohol products, far higher than in Canada. However, she adds, part of Asahi’s problem was that ‘Canada is a complex market that is not well covered by data sources we have currently’.

The company conducted a three-week research project to analyse existing and available data to understand the drivers behind the growth of zero-alcohol in Canada. The research found stigma towards non-alcoholic beer around whether the quality was as high as alcoholic beers, and a feeling that low-alcohol should only be drunk when there is an inability to get ‘real’ beer.

However, for many younger Canadians it was viewed as a positive choice to opt to have non-alcoholic beer. Others saw zero-alcohol products as a positive choice on occasions when a lower-alcohol beverage might be useful, such as when driving. “No- and low-alcohol has different levels of maturity in different markets,” says Heleyová. “Canada is a market where the category has started to boom. It was interesting to see the occasions and drivers for where people see the specific category as suitable and welcoming for them.”

Trends come and go, but a product that has existed since 1842 – the date when the first pilsner beer was brewed in Plzeň, Czechia – remains a cornerstone of the world beer industry.

For Asahi, its role is to help lager continue to find new customers as the 21st century rolls on.