2023 marked an important milestone in Heineken’s history: the brand's 150th anniversary. The perfect time to remind people of our history, celebrate our legacy and talk about the quality of our products. But Heineken is not in the beer business: it's in the business of good times. So when we discovered that people all over the world mistreated our brand by misspelling it, misusing it and mispronouncing it... we decided to celebrate our anniversary by giving people exactly what they wanted: 150 years of good times. One way or another.

To celebrate Heineken 150th anniversary, Heineken stopped being Heineken for a full year by changing its brand into all the misspells, mispronunciations and misuses coming from people all over the world, so that everyone could enjoy a Heineken in their own way.

In other words: 150 years of good times. One way or another.

2023 marked an important milestone in Heineken’s history: the brand's 150th anniversary. The perfect time to remind people of our history, celebrate our legacy and talk about the quality of our products, right? Nope. GenZ told us clearly: they couldn’t care less about brand anniversaries. And, telling them how OLD Heineken was, wasn’t exactly going to win them over. So we needed to find a different way to leverage this event and get them to care about our brand. And since we discovered that none of them knows anything about our brand (including how to spell Heineken), we decided to celebrate the only thing they care about: 150 years of good times. One way or another. And just like that misspells and mispronunciations about our brand turned from negatives into unique selling propositions, so successful that the campaign will run for another year.

In 2023, Heineken changed its entire global labeling production with all the misspells and nicknames from all over the world: over 300 million bottles (projected to become over 2 billions in 2025), 0 correctly spelled “Heineken”. As well as: beer trucks, bar signs, beer taps, social media handles and more. A global tv campaign, OOH and social content celebrated people mistreating our brand for the sake of good times. While misspelling Heineken online rewarded people with special promos based on their misspell. Then we activated every market with local top spins activations, including exclusive collabs with: Adidas, MSGM, Monopoly and more.

Even though our lawyers really advised against it, stop being Heineken for a full year was a great business decision, since people loved it so much that sales went up 32%,

brand recall skyrocketed up to +354% and the anniversary campaign became the most successful global PR launch date. So much so that the brand has decided to keep it running for another year.