It all began on July 14, 2008, when Anheuser-Busch (AB) was acquired by InBev, a Belgian brewer, creating the world's largest brewer (AB InBev). For 11 years, Anson Frericks worked for AB InBev, rising to the position of president of sales and distribution.
Mr. Frericks had a ringside seat to the fall of an American mercantile icon, Bud Light. On April 1, 2023, a culmination of massive errors and failed corporate policies led to the catastrophic decision to use transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney to sell beer. Frericks wrote a book on the Bud Light catastrophe, “Last Call for Bud Light,”
Within three weeks, Bud Light lost 40% of its customers, and most analysts believe they will never get them back. That's how seriously AB InBev totally misjudged their customers and the beer market.
AB InBev began to go downhill when they moved their headquarters from St. Louis to New York City. Dave Weigel interviewed Frericks for Semafor.
You lost a lot of people that were more Midwestern or family oriented. You picked a lot of people that were younger, more urban in their tastes. In the Midwest, Anheuser, Busch, Bud Light, Budweiser, had 50% plus market share. It was much less in New York. I’d say that the Dylan Mulvaney downfall started there. We started dropping country music sponsorships and started replacing them with techno festivals and techno sponsorships.
Absolutely clueless.
The fall accelerated when the pandemic began. AB InBev brought in a Brazilian-born CEO, Michel Doukeris, who was full of brilliant ideas. None of them panned out. Leading "the beer industry in innovations," is how Doukeris put it.
Frericks notes, "Pasteurized bottles in the 1870s were a beer innovation, as were refrigerated railcars. Figuring out how to brew hard seltzer and package it in a Bud Light wrapper, as Doukeris did, was not."
The AB InBev board saw that nothing was working out: catchy phrases, new slogans, and techno festivals instead of C&W concerts were all failures at moving the needle.
Wholesalers fretted. Anheuser-Busch’s board didn’t seem to care. Doukeris had worked at the company for decades. He had a global mindset. And he was committed to taking Anheuser-Busch’s ESG efforts to the next level, which the directors all seemed on board with. At an investor meeting in late 2021, he outlined four new goals. The first three were to lead and grow the beer category, to digitize the business, and to focus on global brands to drive down the debt versus profit ratio. Typical corporate stuff. The fourth priority? ESG.
Doukeris showed his true colors when he appeared on Fortune’s podcast, Leadership Next, with the magazine’s then-CEO, Alan Murray. In addition to praising the UN's goals for "sustainability," the clueless CEO actually stated that "profit " was only one of the goals for the company.
“Of course, profit is one of the goals of the company, and that’s why companies exist—to deploy capital and to be able to compensate the shareholders [by] having returns on the capital that you deploy. But our role goes far beyond that.” He added, "financial goals, commercial goals, ESG goals, they need to be aligned for us to deliver on the purpose and overall goals of the company.”
So, of course, he hired Alissa Heinerscheid as vice president for Bud Light in 2023, instead of a 40-year vet whom Frericks called "probably the best marketer the company ever had."
I knew Alissa. I don’t remember her being a remarkable employee. And I think she brought her politics to the job. At that time, in 2021 and 2022, you couldn’t really push back on brand people who said they wanted to make it more progressive and do more political advertising. And something that might fly in New York City might not fly in the rest of the country, where the customer base was.
With the Dylan Mulvaney partnership — I don’t think that people in Chelsea realized how controversial the transgender movement was. At the time, there were 25 bills in various state legislatures about banning gender affirming care for minors, or “biological men” competing against women in sports. When they saw that sponsorship, a lot of people scratched their heads. And the company could either stand by Alissa and Dylan Mulvaney and say, “No, this is the direction of the brand, we’re going to be like Ben & Jerry’s” or “hey, we screwed up, and this is not what the brand stands for.” The response was indicative of a company that could not serve multiple masters.
"Meritocracy was out. 'Diversity' was in," Frericks writes. How bad did it get?
In 2021, the company introduced “diversity dashboards.” These dashboards showed the race and gender makeup of each team. They were initially supposed to be used for “informational purposes” only, but they were soon used to judge managers whose teams were not “diverse” enough. Diversity meant race and gender. Diversity of thought wasn’t even on the dashboard. Having a “diverse” team soon became an unwritten prerequisite to receive a mover rating.
AB InBev didn't cave to wokeness only because of left-wing politics. Wall Street has been infected with wokeness, and many of the big institutional investors insist on DEI goals in companies they invest in.
The Mulvaney debacle was not a shot out of the blue. It was the end result of years of policies that favored non-business goals over common sense and profits.
DEI hasn't gone away. It's simply gone underground, been rebranded, renamed, and refashioned into something more palatable and less noticeable.
What of Bud Light? Tell me this Super Bowl ad isn't an attempt to go over the top with testosterone-fueled craziness in an attempt to tell men that Bud Light is for "real men."
