THE MORNING RANT: No, the Bud Light Debacle Will Not Be a Business School Case Study; It Was Elite MBA Indoctrination Put Into Practice

There is a trope going around that the Bud Light debacle will be a case study for future generations of MBA students. Many conservative writers whom I respect too much to call out by name have written some variation of the following:

“In the future, elite MBA programs will be teaching the case of Bud Light as an example of how to destroy a brand and alienate customers.”

With all due respect, no they won’t.

The actions that destroyed Bud Light were the actual implementation of what is being taught at our most prestigious business schools. The Anheuser Busch executives who destroyed Bud Light and caused immense financial damage to the company are all graduates of elite MBA programs.

Alissa Heinerscheid, the VP of Marketing at Anheuser Busch who hired female impersonator Dylan Mulvaney to be a face of Bud Light, has an MBA from Wharton.

Group Vice President Daniel Blake, who hired Ms. Heinerscheid to overhaul the customer base of Bud Light, has an MBA from the University of Virginia.

CEO Brendan Whitworth, who employed Blake and Heinerscheid to implement his vision for the company, obtained a Harvard MBA in 2008.

The MBA culture they reflect holds blue collar Americans in contempt. It doesn’t take an Ivy League MBA to mock and sneer at your loyal customers, but it certainly helps.

Overlooked in Ms. Heinerscheid’s famous insult of Bud Light’s customers as being “fratty” and not diverse, is the very explicit statement of hers that she had a “super clear mandate” from above to fix the demographic problem of the nation’s number one beer brand. Anheuser Busch’s executives, with their fancy MBAs, clearly disliked Bud Light’s customers, and told her to fix that problem.

“I had this super clear mandate. It’s like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. What does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity… it means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different. And appeals to women and to men. And representation, isn’t it the heart of evolution? We had this hangover. I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty out of touch humor and it was really important that we had another approach.”

The great Victor Davis Hanson had an article at American Greatness a few days ago, which included this indictment of the destruction being wrought in corporate America by executives who were maleducated in prominent MBA programs.

By absorbing the MBA programs at the major universities, the Left ensures that the new corporate credentialed elite has never gotten its hands grubby or stained in the lower echelons of business, or worked its way up the long, grimy corporate ladder. Instead, unpolluted the new execs transition from their MBA courses in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and in environmental, social, and governance to the activist corporate boardroom.

No, MBA programs will not be teaching how Anheuser Busch’s woke executives sabotaged the nation’s number one beer, nor how AB turned its once loyal customers into angry former customers.

Instead, you can expect that the “lessons” that will be taught at our elite business schools going forward will be that:

• Bud Light was a brand with a problematic, non-diverse customer base.
• Bud Light’s destiny was decline and obsolescence due to the demographic inevitability of America’s deplorables being replaced by a rainbow of diverse persxns.
• Heinerscheid brilliantly and bravely tried to save the doomed brand, but it was just too late.
• Heinerscheid was victimized by the patriarchy who blamed her for the unsuccessful effort to save their doomed brand.

There have been conflicting reports in recent days about whether or not Blake and Heinerscheid were finally dismissed by AB, or whether they are still employed but “on leave.”

None of that matters so long as CEO Brendan Whitworth is still in charge. He is directly responsible for a left-wing 30-something with an elitist education being put in charge of the Bud Light brand. If that wasn’t his vision, his chain of command wouldn’t be hiring people like her. She did exactly what she was hired to do, and now she is taking the fall for doing her job.

Mr. Whitworth needs to resign in disgrace for the irreversible damage he has done to the Bud Light and Budweiser brands.

By the way, the damage done by Brendan Whitworth and his merry band of toxic MBAs cannot be reversed. There has never been a mass-market beer brand that gave up market share, only to regain it later.

Without even discussing regional brands that were once widely popular before suffering a sales implosion (such as Jax, Stroh’s, or Heileman’s) there were several prominent national beer brands that were once the equivalent of today’s largest brands.

Falstaff was the 3rd largest brewer in the country in the mid-1960s, with over 5% national market share and 10 breweries scattered among several states. In fact, it was such brewing powerhouse that the state of Rhode Island tried to block its acquisition of Narragansett Brewing Company on antitrust grounds, in a case that reached the Supreme Court. When Falstaff started losing market share in the 1970s, it fell apart rapidly.

Schlitz was the 2nd largest brewer in the country as recently as the mid-1970s. As I wrote about recently when comparing Bud Light’s situation to Schlitz’s brand suicide, its management made some calamitous decisions that alienated its customers, after which Schlitz went into a death spiral.

Pabst was a major national brand that sold over 18 million barrels of beer in 1977. It went into a tailspin that it could never pull out of, and its annual sales dropped to less than 1 million barrels by the year 2000.

Anheuser Busch survived for decades as the nation’s largest brewer while most of its competitors perished, often as the result of awful management decisions. Brendan Whitworth has finally done what none of Budweiser’s competitors could ever do…he knocked his own company out of the top spot. Well done, Mr. Whitworth, your success is a tribute to your Harvard MBA.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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