In the past, Brahma, the most traditional Brazilian beer, also known as the number one beer, had many ads with celebrities pointing out the number. Leadership was a brand perception and reflected in volume and market share.

The introduction of Pure-Malt Brands such as Heineken and Amstel had a seismic impact on the Brazilian Beer Market. Overnight, sales plummeted, and all the major Brazilian Brands, including Brahma, were forced to adapt their formulas or launch new products to compete.

Brahma strategically focused its communication on its main functional benefit, creaminess, a characteristic inherited from its roots in Chopp Brahma (Draft Beer). This emphasis on a quality process and attribute helped Brahma regain its leadership position and integrate Brahma's communication into Brazilian Culture.

I'll show you the tools I have developed to help Brahma remain Brazil's number one beer.

The innovation strategy for Brahma had messed up Brahma portfólio Architecture. Although the campaign strategy focused only on Brahma Chopp, Brahma Double Malt, and Chopp Brahma, with the new three launches - Brahma Double Malt Wheat, Brahma Double Malt Toasted and Brahma Double Malt Black - Brahma had nine products with different positioning, targets, and ambitions.

Our innovation strategy had some guardrails—such as reinforcing creaminess and being easy to talk about—but it lacked clear guidance for each product in the portfolio.

That's why we sought inspiration from distilled brands, which deal with many different products with a consistent brand story.

Keeping walking from Johnnie Walker is all about human progress, and the whole product portfolio ensures the brand story is aligned with the position.

We do more than assign a role of each Product for Brahma; we set the occasions, platforms, targets for each, and aimed to tell the Brahma history by its portfolio.

The journey of Creaminess - the progression of the Brahmosidade way of being.

The nature of the ease of linear progression is precisely to adapt the proposed gradation to our level on each occasion.

This adaptation does not create a negative value, as its main interest is to promote comfort. For each occasion, a simple and easy choice for the consumer.

Yeah, I have not misread it. That's the amount of money Brahma wasted in 2022 by investing in campaigns with low Brand Recall.

For a category mainly dependent on Salience, saying something was wrong with Brahma Campaigns is unnecessary, but my investigation has shown the main reason:

Brahma is a big brand present in every corner of Brazil. With many agencies and coworkers working on the brand, losing brand management control is easy. However, the mistakes were part of the execution and but impact the Brahma Strategy and its results. A tool to track errors and give the execution team the correct brand guidance was necessary.

Brahma Creativity Consistency Pulse is a tool for tracking brand presence in any channel. It helped the brand recover R$68MM or U$13,5MM —almost the amount of investment from the main competitor.

Campaigns

For campaigns, the learnings from the post-test teach us the importance of communication fundamentals. For instance, the product should have a protagonism in the campaign story. Using the AB-InBev Scale of creativity, we also set the minimum grade for the campaign: 6. That means the campaign should be at least unique, new, and imaginative. Other factors such as the correct logo (yeah, people used the logo incorrectly) and brand archetype should be addressed.

Social

Brahma's leading social media mistake was the many messages and texts in the creative. The tool defined good social media practices, such as using only one message and limiting each creative to 40 characters.

Bottom-funnel

Again, we set specific criteria for the bottom funnel, such as a single and clear CTA.

The best brand definition for me is from an anthropologist, Bob Deutsch, who said a brand is a metaphorical fusion between people's stories about a product and its own stories.

Tension is essential to every story and tool to ensure that creaminess, Brahma's functional benefit, could be part of the culture. At Ambev, we discussed a lot about he voltage and tension of ideas. The higher the tension, the higher the voltage.

Tension became part of the brief for Brahma. A single change had a huge impact on campaign ideas. I also developed a tension methodology and bank of cultural tensions to create more ideas connected to Brazilian behavior. Here some examples:

I also set a creative monthly agenda, during which the Brahma Team stopped to see some studies on skills and improvements the brand strategy should have. Here are some examples. The complete studies are here.