Budweiser is the world's best-selling beer and is known as the king of beer. Over the past 100 years, Anhales-Busch (AB) has not only created the glory of Budweiser, but also made this local small brewery a global beer giant with 5 generations of efforts.
From a local small winery to the world's beer king, and from the industry giant to the altar, how did AB's "century-old storm" evolve, and how should it meet the challenges in the future?
1. Grow into the "King of Beer"
This has to start with the first generation of the Bush family, the "pioneer" of AB Company, Adolphus Bush, who has not only become the first national beer brand in the United States, but also the first sales volume in the country.
Adolfos Bush
Born in 1839, Adolfos was the 21st child of a large German winemaker family. In 1857, he followed the wave of immigration to St. Louis, USA. He worked as a crew member for two years, then used his estate to set up a winemaking raw material supply company, and later inherited his father-in-law's winery. Adolphus's entrepreneurial journey may sound smooth, but from the moment he set foot on the land of St. Louis, he was doomed to face extremely fierce competition.
When he arrived in St. Louis, 1/4 of the city's residents were from Germany. At that time, the United States was still a whiskey-drinking country, and in order to meet the demand of local immigrants in Germany to drink beer, there were 40 breweries in St. Louis, producing about 18 million bottles of beer per year.
Adolfos's father-in-law, Eberhard Anheuser, a German descendant, ran a soap factory and later took over a bankrupt "Bavarian brewery". However, because the old Anhales is not good at brewing beer, the beer produced is very poor, and the guests of the bar will even spit on the wine to express their dissatisfaction.
Fierce competition, poor products, poor sales... These were Adolfos' original intentions to improve the brewing process of beer. And how did he stand out from dozens of breweries and make the poor-tasting beer into the number one best-selling Budweiser in the United States? It can be summed up in three words: see yourself, see heaven and earth, and see sentient beings.
See yourself: the first thing to improve is the taste. What should I do if the beer is not good? Buy the secret recipe. As the company's president, Adolfos immediately bought back a secret Czech winemaking method through his friends. This method comes from a small Czech city, BUDĚJOVIC. The local brewing industry is renowned as a veritable "beer city".
Cesky Budějovice
In 1262, the Budval Distillery introduced a new wine named after the city (Budwise), a beer with a strong malt aroma and a slightly bitter taste that is known as the "Budweiser" beer. Adolphus retained the name after buying the recipe, and since then, Budweiser has enabled his family business to gain a foothold in the beer industry and become increasingly competitive.
See the world: innovate technology, create distribution networks. This year in 2022, the beer we drink will be filled and produced in the place of origin and transported to China along the way, and the taste when it reaches our hands is almost the same as when it leaves the factory. But in the 19th century, when sealing technology was limited, beer could not be preserved for a long time, and could only be brewed locally and consumed locally. Almost all wineries are troubled by this, but there is nothing they can do.
Adolphus has always wanted to develop a national beer that caters to a wide range of tastes, so he traveled around Europe, examined technology, and was the first to use pasteurization and refrigerated transportation, and AB became the first manufacturer to use pasteurization to brew beer.
Thanks to refrigerated transportation and extensive rail network, AB established the first beer distribution network in the United States and officially established the "Budweiser" brand in 1876, at which point the complete brewing-distribution process of Budweiser was completed.
See all sentient beings: the brand image is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. In 1900, Budweiser had become the largest beverage producer in the United States, producing millions of barrels of beer a year, all of which were inseparable from a very good marketing idea, that is, to "connect Budweiser with the American spirit."
Adolfos printed 150,000 copies of an oil painting depicting American history and symbolizing the American spirit, and sent it to all the shops in the country that sold alcohol. The picture shows American officer Custer leading his men to a deadly fight with the Indians, but he neither mentioned Budweiser nor encouraged everyone to buy it, but wrote the word "Budweiser" in the lower right corner of the upper frame.
The marketing was so successful that perhaps the most low-income Americans saw it in that era, and Budweiser was widely known in the United States. In the decades since, Budweiser has continued to launch countless impressive advertisements, such as animal spokespersons, sports event sponsorships, vast lands or vast deserts.
Adolfos not only laid the foundation for the development of Budweiser, but also engraved the gene of valuing beer quality and being good at marketing into the genes of this family business.
(To be continued)