Ellas Dunia, Heineken Product Manager at Mendez Co.
of Heineken in the brown bottle had to be used up, pre
ferably as quickly as possible, so that Heineken Beer in the
familiar green bottle could be introduced at the earliest
possible opportunity.
The settlement reached with the Treasury Department
turned the entire Puerto Rican beer market upside-down.
Many brewers, who had been playing a waiting game for
years and had not ventured to make a move specifically
because of the brown bottle law, seized their chance and
tried to grab a share of this interesting beer market with its
annual volume of some 2.5 million hectolitres. Store shelves
were stocked high with all sorts of brands from all corners
of the globe. TVvo years later, however, the great majority of
those brands had disappeared from the scene again.
The introduction of Heineken in the green bottle was
backed by an advertising campaign supported by TV com
mercials. These TV spots showed a brown bottle changing
into a green bottle, with the payoff line 'a wish come true'.
Simple, but effective. The declining sales figures for
Heineken rapidly started to pick up once more. For the
Puerto Rican consumer Heineken in the green bottle had
become value for money again.
But Mendez and Heineken Export also noted that, despite
that colour switch, Heineken had become more vulnerable in
that drastically changed and more sophisticated beer market.
Vulnerable because it only had one pack format on the
market: the 12 fl oz (fluid ounces) bottle. As Luis Alvarez
explains: "Because of all these new entries the Puerto Rican
beer market sophisticated dramatically in a short period of
time. We felt we needed to have an extra package."
COLD
The can was not even discussed as an option. In the past
Mendez had already tried to introduce Heineken in cans,
but the consumers wouldn't accept it. As market research
showed, they thought that a premium brand like Heineken
did not belong in a can. But what did it belong in? The con
clusion was reached fairly quickly that it had to be a bottle
of 7 fl oz (equivalent to about 22 cl). The main reason for
this unusual pack format is the climate in Puerto Rico and
the local beer culture. "Beer is drunk extremely cold here",
explains Product Manager Elias Dunia. "That's obviously
due to the high temperatures. A really cold beer is seen as
a thirst quencher. People often drop by a small store, buy an
ice-cold beer from the refrigerator and then drink it out on
the street. By the time you finish drinking a beer from the
12 fl oz bottle, some of the beer will have become 'warm'
by Puerto Rican standards. Drinking a beer from the 7 fl oz
bottle means that it stays ice-cold until the final swallow,
just like the Puerto Ricans prefer."
The birth of the small Heineken bottle was not an easy
delivery. There were some quizzical looks at Heineken in the
Netherlands in particular. Developing a new bottle is a cost
ly business: Puerto Rico was probably the only market in
the world where the bottle would be used and, what's
more, Heineken had just started on a process of rational
ising its range of bottles. But there was some hesitation at
Mendez as well. What sort of impact would the introduction
of the 7 oz bottle have on sales of its bigger 12 oz brother?
"We thought that the small bottle might cannibalise the 12
fluid ounce format to a slight extent. But the figures tell a
different story: the 7 oz version has in fact doubled the total
sales of Heineken! The 7 oz bottle competed with cans and
not with the 12 oz bottle", explains Mr Dunia.
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