Building a value proposition for BEES

Setting the scene

BEES is AB InBev’s e-commerce platform which small and medium-sized retailers can use to browse products, place orders, arrange deliveries, manage invoices and access business insights. The platform was launched in 2019 in the Dominican Republic and by the end of 2022 will have expanded into 24 markets globally with over two million retailers buying products through the platform on a regular basis.   

Through the BEES platform, retailers can buy both AB Inbev products and selected non-AB Inbev products. The non-AB Inbev products have an agreement with AB Inbev to list their products on the platform to increase distribution in order to reach retailers they previously couldn’t access. These companies who list their products on the Bees platform are referred to as Partners.

To drive customer loyalty, BEES has a rewards programme where retailers receive points on all products purchased on the platform. The points can then be exchanged for rewards. Examples of these rewards are free stock, point-of-sale material for their store or other items of value to retailers.

The BEES Rewards program has different elements to it which can drive different retailer behaviours. An example is an element is called 'Challenges'. 

A Challenge is where a retailer can earn bonus points for doing a specific task like taking a picture of an instore display or by buying more of a certain product (E.g buy 5 cases of product X and you will receive 5000 bonus rewards points)

Partners need to agree and pay to take part in the rewards program and the different rewards elements like Challenges.

The Problem

The BEES Rewards team needed help defining the Value Proposition to partners so that they could build a clear rationale as to why Partners should participate in the rewards program by understanding the Partners key jobs to be done (what partners are trying to get done), pains (the bad outcomes, risks and obstacles related to the jobs) and gains (the outcomes your partners want to achieve / concrete benefits they are aiming for).

The Solution

We started off with a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative approach to understand the needs and benefits which the rewards program offers partners. We analysed data to understand the impact of rewards and sub-elements like Challenges to understand retailer buying behaviour across both AB Inbev products and non-AB Inbev products. In addition, we conducted interviews with partners to understand their key jobs, pains and gains as well as how the rewards program had impacted their business and what they saw as the key benefits.

Once we had gathered all the insight, we conducted numerous working sessions with the BEES Rewards team to map out the Partners key jobs to be done, their pains and gains. 

One examples of this was:

• Job: Build instore product displays
• Pain: Non-compliance with putting up instore displays (even if paid for)
• Gain: The ability to track display implementation in an easy-to-use format

Once we had mapped out all the key jobs to be done, pains and gains. We then focused on the BEES Rewards’ products that the Value Proposition will be built around, the pains it could alleviate and identified how rewards could create partner gains.  An example based on the partner insight identified above is:

• Product/ service: Photo challenges – where the retailer needs to take a photo of an instore display they have put up and upload it onto the platform in order to receive bonus rewards points.
• Pain reliever: The partner can use Photo challenges to ensure that retailers are complying with agreed instore displays
• Gain: The partner can track the number of instore displays that have been executed across all the retailers on the platform 

The Impact

Using the above process, we were able to map out the various products and services offered by BEES Rewards and evaluate them against the Partners jobs to be done, pains and gains. This provided a clear understanding of where BEES Rewards is able to meet Partner needs, where there were potential gaps and where there were some elements of BEES Rewards that weren’t relevant and didn’t hold any value to partners. 

The last phase of the project was to work with the BEES Rewards team to build the Value Proposition and the Go-to-Market approach, highlighting the most important attributes which Partners would value based on the analysis we had done and the approach which should be used to take this to partners to ensure maximum success.