Anson Frericks, the former executive of Anheuser-Busch, explains that the downfall of the company began long before the Dylan Mullvaney debacle.
The company was historically based in St Louis (which is why I’m interested in its history even though I never drank beer). In 2008 it was acquired by a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate. By 2012, almost all of the Americans in the leadership of the company were fired and replaced with Europeans or Brazilians. These people, and most importantly their wives, didn’t want to live in St Louis because they saw the city as provincial and backwards.
The company moved to New York. The European and Brazilian executives, and most importantly their wives, wanted to be part of the fancy set in NYC. This is not a group of people that drinks Bud Light or hangs out with anybody who does. The European and Brazilian executives, and most importantly their wives, felt like no social prestige was accruing to them by virtue of being associated with a Midwestern beer brand that catered to working-class Americans. But it was where their living came from, and the living was lucrative. If you can’t drop Anheuser-Busch, they reasoned, you can change what it stands for. You can associate it with the values that have currency among the fashionable people in NYC. The new leadership of the company started associating the company with the far-left values of the fancy set. Strangely, it didn’t occur to anyone among them that the customers won’t follow the brand into the boutique fru-fru territory.
There’s a lot more to the story but for now I want to share this aspect of it that stood out to me. We all know that Anheuser-Busch was destroyed but I wasn’t aware of this history of its Europeanisation.
Clarissa's Blog 