AB InBev: BEES

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The Client

Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) is a publicly traded company based in Leuven, Belgium. Its diverse portfolio of well over 500 beer brands includes global brands Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois; multi-country brands Beck's, Hoegaarden, Leffe and Michelob ULTRA; and local champions such as Aguila, Antarctica, Bud Light, Brahma, Cass, Castle, Castle Lite, Cristal, Harbin, Jupiler, Modelo Especial, Quilmes, Victoria, Sedrin, and Skol. Geographically diversified with a balanced exposure to developed and developing markets, it leverages the collective strengths of approximately 167,000 colleagues based in nearly 50 countries worldwide.

The Situation

AB InBev wanted to increase customer loyalty and revenue in its B2B e-commerce platform, BEES, using gamification to foster continuous buying.

The Challenge

BEES already had a mobile app on which customers could engage and place orders, but AB InBev wanted a new way to captivate its audience and engage with them in the cycle of new orders, establishing goals in a gamification style. Its challenge was to create a centralized platform that could serve 20 countries without needing to recreate the solution for each new campaign in the future. 

Additionally, the platform needed to be multi-language/multi-country, multi-brand, and able to grow as the project evolved and new types of games were added. And the system needed to work both on desktop and mobile and be embedded in the native BEES mobile app.

AB InBev wanted platform administration centralized in one gamification manager, allowing the campaigns to be run at the brand or campaign websites, accessing game rules and campaign details through REST APIs.

The Solution

Working with Squadra Digital, the teams kicked off the project with DaVinci — a design system platform that was built using Drupal, Acquia Site Factory, and Acquia Site Studio and was already serving at least 100 of the brand’s websites.

Squadra created a new headless profile in Drupal to build the centralized management tool, Campaign Manager, that would also serve the APIs. Now, the BEES teams can manage everything related to the campaigns, such as prizes, rules, audience, game mechanics, and metrics and reports in a centralized administration interface.

The teams leveraged the Acquia Site Studio capabilities to provide the gamification, using Custom Elements to build the game components. This allows the BEES team or brand owner to use these components to run a campaign inside their own website, dragging and dropping components without needing expensive custom development. The brand team can configure the game and its look and feel without the need to access the Campaign Manager platform.

As the Campaign Manager was built outside of Drupal and Acquia, in React, Squadra centralized all admin systems by exposing (with restrictive access, of course) all the endpoints needed to manage the campaigns in the BEES Hub, the micro-front-end architecture.

The Results

AB InBev and BEES can now have as many brand campaign websites as they need, all connected on a centralized management tool through REST APIs, using Site Factory and Site Studio. AB InBev is running campaigns in 15 different countries. Metrics indicate:

• 11%+ uplift against non-gamification campaigns
• Total campaigns delivered: 60
• Total points of connection (POCs) registered: 5,339,425
• Total prizes delivered: 38,117
• Time spent on page reached 18 minutes with POCs that played four rounds