Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (23 page)

The Cardinals were a shadow of the team they used to be. Only Lou Brock remained from the glory days of the 1960s. Gussie had been forced to remove his longtime friend and duck-hunting pal Red Schoendienst as manager. The fans still grumbled about his trading of Steve Carlton, who had gone on to become the undisputed best pitcher in baseball, winning four Cy Young awards. With Carlton in the lineup, the fans and local sportswriters agreed, the Redbirds could have won four division titles in the 1970s. Instead, the team was tied for last place with the New York Mets midway through the 1978 season, putting on its worst performance in fifty years.

Once again, Gussie blew his stack, but this time he didn't march into the dressing room with a retinue of reporters. In a published letter that sounded as if it had been dictated to his secretary, Margaret Snyder, rather than written by a PR man, he lit into the entire Cardinals organization, “down to the bat boys.”

“I am getting damn mad,” he said. “There is no way, and I repeat, no way, I am going to tolerate this type of performance for the most loyal fans in the world, and I mean this.... I want this message carried loud and clear: The Big Eagle, the Boss, Gussie—whatever they want to call me—IS NOT HAPPY! I am tired of excuses. Management does not pay salaries to supposedly quality players for constant mental errors.... I personally have not seen too many head-first slides, the opposition's second baseman being kicked into left field on double plays and people banging into walls to make plays.... My patience is getting thin.... I did not recommend the purchase of the Cardinals to the Anheuser-Busch board so that, 25 years later, the Cardinals would have the worst record in their history. I trust that I have made myself clear and for everyone's sake I am praying for the situation to improve.” (It did, but only slightly; the Cardinals finished second-to-last, ahead of the Mets.)

It was a sign of the changing times that St. Louis sportswriters did not unanimously praise Gussie for his tirade.
Globe-Democrat
columnist Rich Koster called it a “cheap shot,” and offered up a little sports relativism for the man who believed that second place wasn't worth shit. “[The Cardinals'] value is not that they win or lose; it's that they are here to enjoy,” he wrote. “And while their owner is No. 1 in beer, his position in the community is perhaps misused by making failure out of mere defeat.”

During Gussie's appearances at the office, he apparently didn't hear the heresy that was being bandied about, namely that Budweiser—the brand his grandfather had introduced to the world 103 years before, the cornerstone of the Anheuser-Busch empire, the lifeblood of the Busch heirs, and the guiding principle of his life—was finished. Budweiser sales were flat, and the future belonged to new brands like Natural Light and Michelob Light. The younger generation had no affinity for the beer of their fathers and grandfathers. The old warhorse was on its last legs.

At least, that's what Denny Long was being told by some of his young sales and marketing managers. Conventional wisdom in the beer business held that once a brand started to die, there was no reviving it. The younger executives believed that Bud was destined to go the way of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz, and the company should put its money and marketing effort into building new brands.

Long didn't buy it. It was true that both of A-B's new light beers had performed only moderately well, selling about 2.5 million barrels each in their first year on the market, and that Budweiser sales appeared to be stalled at 22 million barrels a year. But Bud was still the No. 1 selling beer in the world, and he suspected the lack of growth was the fault of the marketing, or the lack thereof, not the beer. The way he saw it, there were only a few brand names that had become part of the American fabric—Coca-Cola, Hershey, Levi's, Campbell Soup—and he believed that Budweiser could be one, too. So when one of his executives asked, “What are we going to do with Budweiser?” he responded, “We are going to breathe new life into it.”

His idea was to saturate the public consciousness with print ads and TV commercials aimed at the blue-collar consumer. In addition to sporting events, “Every bus stop is going to say ‘Budweiser,'” he told the marketing team. “You are not going to drink it there; it's not a place where you are going to spend your money. But Budweiser will be in your head, and you will have it with you all the time, to the point where asking for a ‘Bud' becomes a habit.”

The assignment went to D'Arcy, MacManus, Masius, the St. Louis–based ad agency that had handled the Budweiser account since 1915. D'Arcy and Anheuser-Busch had literally grown up together, bonded by business and blood. D'Arcy's CEO, James B. (for Busch) Orthwein, was August's first cousin and a longtime member of the A-B board. James's father, Percy Orthwein, had married Gussie's sister Clara, and served as D'Arcy's CEO and an A-B director before him. Over the years, D'Arcy had parlayed its Busch family connection and its high profile work for A-B into a national reputation as one of the most creative agencies in the world of advertising. D'Arcy was responsible for the enormously successful “When You Say Bud (You've Said It All)” campaign in 1970. More recently, “Jimmy” Orthwein had played a pivotal role in helping convince other board members to side with August in ousting Gussie.

Long wanted a new Budweiser campaign that would be “a salute to the American worker.” He knew it would be criticized as jumping on the bandwagon again, because Miller was mining the blue-collar vein. But he thought Miller had the right idea, just the wrong beer. As he often said at the employee meetings, “We are not flashy. We are seldom the darlings of the industry. We just continue to meet and overcome challenges.” D'Arcy was told that the new campaign—like its “When You Say Bud” campaign—needed to be “comprehensive,” meaning it had to serve as the sole advertising message for Budweiser over a period of several years, not just for a few TV commercials.

August didn't get involved with ad campaigns until the agencies and the marketing department made their first storyboard presentations to him and Denny Long. He responded powerfully to this one, which proposed to show everyday folks working on the job and then rewarding themselves with a cold Bud at the end of the day. Thematically, it was derivative of the “Miller Time” campaign (“If you've got the time, we've got the beer”). But August fixed on one particular tagline from a list of a dozen or so suggestions—“For All You Do, This Bud's for You.” He thought it was perfect: catchy, simple, and sustainable.

From then on, he practically dictated the elements he wanted to see in the ads and commercials, most importantly real people, not actors. Hence, the first commercial was shot with real factory workers on the job in a Houston meat-packing plant. Subsequent shoots featured real construction workers, truckdrivers, butchers, bartenders, and farmers. Per August, only twelve-ounce longneck bottles were shown, no cans. Even though cans were the real working man's preference, he thought the classic glass bottle looked better and was more in keeping with tradition, since his great-grandfather had established Budweiser as “the king of bottled beer.” He also believed that bottles provided the consumer with a superior taste and tactile experience. To help insure blue-collar authenticity in the ads and commercials, he began inviting an ad hoc group of plant employees to D'Arcy's presentations, encouraging them to comment on what the agency was putting forward.

August's micromanagement at times rankled the D'Arcy creative team, but the collaboration ultimately resulted in one of the most effective and memorable ad campaigns of all time. “This Bud's for You” ran for more than a decade and, over the course of dozens of commercials, embedded itself in the American consciousness alongside the likes of Campbell Soup's “Mmm Mmm Good.”

More importantly, the campaign paid off immediately as Budweiser sales roared back to life, increasing by more than 10 million barrels in the eighteen months following the airing of the first commercial.

D'Arcy also handled the Natural Light account, and the agency's campaign went at Miller head-on with a series of print ads and TV commercials “designed to drive them up the wall” in Milwaukee, according to Mike Roarty. A typical print ad showed a can of Natural Light with the caption, “Brewed with water, rice, hops, barley and yeast.” Next to it was a can of Miller Lite with the caption, “Brewed with water, corn syrup (dextrose), modified hops extract, propylene glycol alginate, amyloglucosidase and potassium metabisulfite.”

For the TV commercials, D'Arcy and Roarty's marketing team hit upon the idea of using Miller's own advertising against it by casting some of Miller's ex-jocks in spoofs of their famous “Tastes Great, Less Filling” spots. In addition to Mickey Mantle, they signed up former Miami Dolphin linebacker Nick Buoniconti, former heavyweight boxing champ Joe Frazier, former Yankees pitcher Catfish Hunter, and former NBA star Walt Frazier for a series of thirty-second spots that featured malaprop-prone comic Norm Crosby interviewing the “five athletic supporters” about why they had switched from Lite to Natural Light (they each signed a sworn affidavit that they picked it over Miller Lite in a blind taste test).

Roarty debuted the campaign during the broadcast of NCAA basketball finals, commercial high ground previously held by Miller but now captured at considerable cost by A-B, which also had acquired sponsorship rights for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and twenty of twenty-six major league baseball teams.

A spokesman for Philip Morris carped that the “Switch” ads were typical of A-B's copycat creativity: “What do you expect? The ‘This Bud's For You' campaign was stolen from our ‘Miller Time' spots. It violates every rule of marketing.”

Roarty could barely contain his delight at the turnabout. “Sports figures are America's heroes, and [Miller] was wise enough to use ex-athletes,” he told a reporter, smiling impishly. “But how long can you let them get away with that? You couldn't let them give the impression that they owned the franchise, could you now?”

In October 1980, August made good on his 1962 promise to Denny Long that they would rise to the top together, promoting his former assistant to president of the company. Two months later, A-B's two top dogs stood with Gussie as a group of plant employees and executives gathered in the racking room to witness the ritual bunging of the fifty millionth barrel of beer produced that year.

“This is the big one,” Long said of the gold-plated barrel specially made for the occasion. “In the 128-year history of Anheuser-Busch there has never been a greater moment than this,” said August, who had made sure his father was present for the ceremony. The old man smiled proudly as August used a gold mallet to pound the rubber plug into the commemorative barrel of Budweiser. It took him three tries, and he got a face full of foam in the process, but he wiped it off with a handkerchief and quipped, “Best thing in the world to take a bath in.” Looking frail, Gussie didn't address the gathering, but he joined in enthusiastically when the crowd broke into in a ragged version of the old German drinking song “Ein Prosit” (A toast).

There was plenty to drink to. A-B's record 50 million barrels increased its lead over Miller to nearly 13 million barrels and brought its market share to 27.8 percent. Miller's operating profit dropped 20 percent, and after five years of gobbling up market share, the company posted a mere .03 percent gain, to 20.7. The fast-moving freight train had slowed to a crawl.

August already was looking past the war with Miller. He'd recently completed his long-desired corporate reorganization, which included making Anheuser-Busch, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of a Delaware-based holding company called Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. The new structure would “more clearly communicate the increasingly diversified nature of Anheuser-Busch business,” he said. His plan had always been to diversify the company in much the same way his grandfather August A. had done during Prohibition, expanding further into related areas where A-B had developed expertise—theme parks, resorts, leisure-time activities, real estate, nonalcoholic beverages, snack foods, and baked products. The experience of competing with the much larger and more diversified Philip Morris made it all too clear that being the biggest brewer was not enough to guarantee the company's continued success and independence. With Denny Long and Mike Roarty in place, he felt it was now time to focus his full attention on a “diversification initiative,” through which he hoped to lead the company to heights his ancestors never imagined.

Never one to be outdone, eighty-two-year-old Gussie announced an initiative of his own. On March 15, 1981, he revealed to forty guests at a private dinner party in St. Petersburg, Florida, that he had secretly married again. The fourth Mrs. Busch was Margaret Snyder, a sixty-four-year-old widow who was the first woman ever named to the A-B board of directors and who had been his secretary for sixteen years.

In the early summer of 1981, Andy Steinhubl, A-B's vice president of brewing and chief brew master, was sitting in a meeting with the wholesalers' panel, a representative group of the company's distributors that conferred with home office executives several times a year. The panel was August's creation, and it was a good thing, but at times the meetings grew tedious. This was one of those times.

Steinhubl could tell that August was bored, too, because he'd left his seat and was pacing around in the back of room, his mind on something other than the presentation. Suddenly, August was standing next to him, leaning down and whispering. “I want you to make me up a recipe for something we will call Budweiser Light,” he said, and immediately went back to pacing.