Heineken: Making Myanmar Roads Safer

Road deaths are a serious public health problem in Myanmar, and drink driving is part of it. As a leading brewer, Heineken Myanmar had both a responsibility and a reputational interest in changing behaviour, and spearheaded Making Myanmar Roads Safer to educate and inform beer drinkers not to drink and drive.

The challenge for a beer brand is credibility: the message must be sincere, must not lecture, and must reach drinkers who have heard the warning before and ignored it.

Ruder Finn Era, then ERA Communications, supported the awareness campaign through creative content development. The insight was that people respond to danger in different ways, so the content was built on two balanced pillars: emotional marketing that made the consequences personal, and statistical marketing that made the scale of the problem undeniable.

By covering both aspects of the objective in the content plan, the campaign could reach drinkers who were moved by stories and those who were persuaded by facts, while keeping Heineken's voice consistent and credible on a difficult subject.