Heineken's Transformation of Cashback Campaigns with AI Automation

As living costs and inflation rise, consumers are increasingly seeking ways to maximize their purchasing power. According to McKinsey, consumers are now spending more to buy less, with U.S. consumer packaged goods (CPG) volume declining by 2 to 4 percent on average. Larger subcategories, such as vitamins and supplements, have suffered a 5 percent decline compared to 2022.

The same research shows that the top three reasons consumers give for reducing purchase volume all relate to price or affordability:

Heineken, a global retail leader, has extensive experience in launching cashback campaigns through an external agency. While these campaigns successfully boosted sales and enhanced customer loyalty, Heineken recognized the necessity for internal management, thereby eliminating dependency on external agencies.

A significant challenge in the automation phase was developing an AI system capable of handling various receipt formats and conditions in supermarket chains, without requiring ongoing technical or AI support.

AI integration also improved Heineken's capability to detect and prevent fraud. The system was designed to identify unusual patterns in receipt submissions, such as the repeated use of the same receipt or abnormally high cashback claims, thus protecting campaign integrity.

While the campaigns achieved notable success in boosting immediate sales, they also highlighted significant gaps that limited their long-term value due to the cooperation with an external agency. One of the main issues was the lack of data sharing. The external agency collected but did not share participants' valuable data with Heineken. This lack of data sharing meant that Heineken missed opportunities to leverage this information for future marketing strategies, customer relationship management, and personalized promotions.

Realizing its broader potential, we developed for Heineken an in-house marketing dashboard that allows teams across different countries to independently set up and manage various types of cashback campaigns. This platform supports flexible campaign management, including diverse offers like "10% cashback," "full price refund for one unit," or "buy 2 get 1 free."

The implementation of the Intelligent Cashback Automation & Image Recognition Platform has facilitated the execution of 12 nationwide cashback campaigns for 7 brands across all 27 retail chains in the Netherlands. Notably, these nationwide campaigns were executed by a small internal team at Heineken, parallel to their day-to-day tasks, without requiring any technical or AI expertise. The marketing team can configure campaign rules and launch them with one click, enabling them to run multiple cashback campaigns simultaneously for different products, product categories, retail partners, or discount types.