Anheuser-Busch’s U.S. chief marketing officer Benoit Garbe is leaving after the company reported a 29% decline in U.S. third-quarter earnings and backlash against Bud Light continues, CNN reports.
AB InBev issued a statement saying Garbe, who has been CMO for two years, “will be resigning at the end of the year in order to embark on a new chapter in his career.”
Kyle Norrington, Anheuser-Busch’s U.S. chief commercial officer, will assume Garbe’s duties.
Garbe oversaw Bud Light’s ill-fated advertising partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, launched on April 1 with a post on Instagram. It pictured Mulvaney holding a personalized can of Bud Light to celebrate “365 Days of Girlhood.”
His departure comes on the heels of Captiv8, the California ad agency behind Bud Light’s disastrous transgender campaign, firing 30 employees, about 20% of its workforce, last month.
Immediately after customers’ backlash against the campaign, AB put Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid and AB group VP Daniel Blake on leave.
However, a regional marketing chief says the two are “gone, gone,” adding that Anheuser-Busch does not want to say they were fired, the New York Post reports.
AB said sales to U.S. retailers are down 17%, “primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light.” Without giving specific figures, the company said it has been financially supporting distributors who have been hurt by the sales decline and has increased its marketing spend for Bud Light.
Anheuser-Busch’s market capitalization has declined by $11.4 billion since the Bud Light fiasco began, from $133.78 billion on March 30 to $121.38 billion on November 16.
Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher says Bud Light sales volume in the July to September quarter decreased 30%, on par with its second-quarter deterioration.
“That tells me that this is quasi-permanent, meaning those customers are just lost forever,” Schuhmacher says, adding he expects AB will see year-over-year declines in that range for the “foreseeable future.”
Beer experts agree that the customers who have left Bud Light are gone forever.
Nonetheless, Anheuser-Busch research found that 40% of customers who have boycotted the beer are willing to give the brand another try, said AB InBev CEO Michel Doukeris on a Tuesday earnings call.
“That gives us some certainty that we are moving in the right direction,” Doukeris said. “We have a good grip on what we need to do and how we are proceeding from here.”
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