What are the big success stories for your brand over the last 12 months that have driven your brand strength and growth?

So much has changed for brands in the last 12 months as we, like people around the world, navigate new challenges caused by the pandemic. We had to quickly pivot our plans to ensure we were doing what we could do to help our communities, putting our consumers first, and in the process, we embarked on groundbreaking work that we never could have dreamed of.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we leveraged our supply and logistics networks to produce and distribute alcohol-based hand sanitizer and activated our employee networks for community efforts like blood drives and emergency shelters. We also redirected $5 million in sports and entertainment investments to a donation to the American Red Cross, helping them utilize stadiums for temporary blood drive centers and donating airtime for public service announcements. For the first time in 37 years, we gave up our Super Bowl ad spot and reallocated the budget to raise awareness about the COVID-19 vaccine in partnership with the Ad Council. As community needs shifted, we partnered with the Biden Administration to incentivize Americans to “get a shot and get a beer” to reach the 70% national vaccination goal. Leaning into our longstanding role of bringing people together, we brought back our classic 1999 Wassup campaign to encourage people around the globe to check on friends while home in quarantine.

At the same time, we had to continue to plan and execute on core brand campaigns to remain relevant for consumers around the world. We deepened our work in global football, including continuing as the Official Beer of the English Premier League and La Liga and debuting our award-winning Messi 644 campaign, where we celebrated Lionel Messi’s record breaking 644th career goal by sending custom Budweiser bottles to goalkeepers in honor of each of his goals scored against them. The Messi 644 campaign was covered in over 84 countries, delivered more than 3 Billion Earned Media Impressions and won a Cannes Lion for Entertainment in Sport. Overall, our results have been very strong in 2021 as we’ve delivered a net revenue growth of 39.2% against last year. Our approach over the last year has spoken to where consumers are right now – in the day-to-day throes of the most challenging time in living memory and desperately wanting things to feel normal. It’s been a balancing act, and I believe we’ve managed it well.

Thinking about the customer: we have a hypothesis that consumers once made purchases to signify their economic capital, then later to signify their intellectual capital, and most recently to signal their “ethical capital”. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint? What about your brand do you fix & what do you flex?

Today’s consumer is absolutely looking for brands to address the issues facing the world. Budweiser has a responsibility as the world’s most valuable alcohol brand to tackle the biggest problems out there. That’s why we aren’t just talking about these issues, we are actually doing something about them.

In 2018, we made a commitment to brew every bottle of Budweiser with 100% renewable electricity by 2025 because we believe this will help to create a brighter future. The good news is that we are well on our way. To date, we have contracted over 70% of electricity from renewable energy, reaching 100% in markets like the US, Argentina, UK, and Western Europe. We calculate that our commitment will create $1 billion of renewable electricity infrastructure development globally by 2025.  To celebrate, we launched our first global campaign this past Earth Day called “Together We Can Turn This Around.” The campaign was meant to inspire consumers to join us on our journey to a renewable future using our scale and power and illustrating the potential impact of everyone working together to “Turn This Around”. If we all make mindful choices, as brands, as organizations and as people, then we can all have a positive impact on our environment. Even the simplest choices – like choosing to drink a beer brewed with renewable energy – can make a real difference if influential companies like us are willing to act.

Our approach over the last year has spoken to where consumers are right now – in the day-to-day throes of the most challenging time in living memory and desperately wanting things to feel normal

Increasingly, we see that traditional industry or category conventions are less helpful to understand a brands’ commercial landscape, and that understanding and planning around consumer motivations or desires gives a better sense of the true competition. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint?

With regards to competition coming from inside or outside the category, we want to win share of mind and value in the total alcoholic beverage category vs. just the beer category. We believe our growth will come from bringing solutions to be relevant in all alcoholic appropriate occasions.

One of the mega trends that accelerated during the pandemic is a frictionless economy. In order to meet our customer and consumer needs we need to transform our business through technology. The digital transformation has allowed us to understand our consumers and customers like never before and architect our brand efforts to align with those insights.

This is a particular challenge and feat for alcohol companies that are often legally prevented from directly connecting with the consumer. Therefore, we’ve innovated beyond our traditional capabilities to create new value from our ecosystem using data, technology and digital platforms. An example of this on the customer side is BEES, our proprietary B2B digital ordering platform for small and medium retailers that sell our products. BEES combines our best-in-class logistics and sales systems with new digital capabilities, including artificial-intelligence-based algorithms to help customers manage orders, deliveries and inventory, run promotions, and gather business insights. BEES is now available in 12 markets, has over 1.8 million monthly active users, and is capturing $4.5 billion in gross merchandise value in 2021. On the consumer side, our owned direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce portfolio, in Europe (Beer Hawk in the UK and Saveur Biere in France) and Brazil (Ze Delivery), both fulfilled more orders in HY21 than all of 2020 and brought us closer to our end consumer than ever. Both initiatives are allowing us to gather more data on how we can best support our customers’ and consumers’ needs.

Post-COVID, post Social Justice – the world is starting to settle back to a new normal. How have these events affected your brand strategy?

Alongside our increased community efforts and ongoing work, we used the time during the pandemic to accelerate our marketing transformation journey. The pandemic intensified major category and consumer trends that were already in progress, like the shift from out-of-home to in home consumption and the growth of direct to consumer and e-commerce platforms. Globally, we’ve been working to ensure post-pandemic consumer needs are being reflected in everything we do.

The second piece of this is the undeniable need for all companies to ensure they have a workforce as diverse as their customer-base. It is pertinent that brand experiences play a meaningful role in consumers’ lives and reinforce the need for equity and inclusion around the world. Together with Anheuser-Busch, we created the UNCF Budweiser Natalie Johnson Scholarship worth $1 million with the aim of promoting diversity in the brewing industry by supporting students of color pursuing related STEM majors. In association with UNCF, Budweiser will award 25 scholarships annually and provide five paid internships each year to top students interested in the field. We’re also making sure that the athletes and celebrities we work with represent the diverse community of Budweiser fans globally. For example, we were incredibly excited to partner with Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo in a global campaign earlier this year.

We know that more than ever before consumers are looking for brands to take a stand and use their influence to benefit society. In the coming year you’ll be seeing Budweiser use our global platform with even greater purpose to help make the AB InBev purpose of bringing people together for a better world a reality.

What are the major disruptors and accelerators of competition and brand growth on your horizon?

As a company, we’re keeping a close eye on emerging trends and looking to accurately identify those that have the potential power to influence consumers and industries on a broad scale. Right now, we’re seeing some mega-trends emerge, and we’re adjusting our sales accordingly. For example, we’re seeing health and wellness trends informing our long-term product development and innovation, like the launch of Budweiser Zero. Budweiser Zero is now available in eight countries and has more than doubled its volume in the last year. We’re also hearing consumers demand increased authenticity and purpose from brands, and that is influencing every aspect of our marketing communications efforts to ensure we’re able to drive growth for the future. Another emerging trend is the metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Budweiser partnered with Vayner Media’s NFT division as the founding client and is developing NFT programs in the music, sports and culture verticals to deliver new experiences for our consumers and create monetary value for the brand.

We’re also hearing consumers demand increased authenticity and purpose from brands, and that is influencing every aspect of our marketing communications efforts to ensure we’re able to drive growth for the future.