How Marcel Marcondes’s creative conviction helped cement AB InBev’s global beer dominance

Still, Marcondes attributes much of his success to his team and says that his inclusion on the Global Marketer of the Year shortlist is a testament to the effective collaboration at AB InBev. “Being considered for this recognition is less about me and all about us and the work we do,“ he tells The Drum. “For a company our size, you don’t do anything alone. What really matters is what we do as a team and what we do as a company together.”

Marcondes’s journey began in his native Brazil, where he studied marketing as an undergraduate before going on to earn an MBA from Business School São Paulo. Starting his professional career at Unilever, he spent seven years honing his brand management skills before joining AB InBev in 2005. Over the years, Marcondes has held numerous leadership roles, including CMO at Anheuser-Busch and global president of Beyond Beer Co, before being named AB InBev’s global CMO in 2022.

His ascent at AB InBev coincides with the corporation’s evolution into a powerhouse of creativity and innovation, guided by a philosophy Marcondes describes as “using creativity to solve business and consumer problems.” It’s an ethos that has helped to steer AB InBev to marketplace dominance.

Today, AB InBev owns eight of the top 10 most valuable beer brands worldwide, with Corona and Budweiser ranking first and second, respectively. The corporation controls more than a quarter of the world’s total beer production – and that share may be growing. Just last week, the company announced it will begin brewing for Pabst Blue Ribbon and Lone Star Beer after the brands’ contracts with Molson Coors expired.

The behemoth appears nearly unstoppable; in 2023, it raked in record-breaking revenue despite a PR scandal centered on Bud Light’s controversial handling of a partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Marcondes and his team have been instrumental in driving AB InBev’s business wins – a fact that has earned praise from the most prestigious corners of the marketing world. The company was named Creative Marketer of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in both 2022 and 2023 – the first brand owner to ever bag the title in consecutive years. Plus, for three consecutive years, the organization earned recognition as the top advertiser in the World Advertising Research Center’s (Warc) Creative 100 rankings and maintained the top spot in the Effie Index for marketing effectiveness. Marcondes’s own name, meanwhile, has appeared on various lists cataloging the most influential and innovative CMOs in the world, from the likes of Forbes and Business Insider.

In a wide-ranging conversation with The Drum ahead of the announcement of WFA’s Global Marketer of the Year, the legendary marketer opens up about his philosophy – and the journey that got him to the top.

Creativity in service of business growth

At the heart of Marcondes’s vision is a commitment to bringing creativity and business strategy in harmony. “It comes down to two big elements: having a clear role for creativity and also having a [reliable] process,” he says.

On the creative front, “it’s never about creativity for creativity’s sake,” he says. Instead, he argues that creative energy should always be applied in service of solving real business problems and addressing consumer needs. “That’s the philosophy that we instill in the whole organization.”

Behind that creative ethos is a regimen. This is where Creative X comes in. Creative X is a comprehensive framework designed to enhance creative effectiveness and measure the success of various creative efforts across the company’s marketing initiatives.

Creative X includes the company’s in-house creative agency, draftLine, which works on real-time responses to cultural moments. It also encompasses a Creative Council, which evaluates campaigns using a standardized rubric, and the Creative Braintrust, established to encourage diverse ideas – inspired by a similar program at Pixar. Creative X also includes various training initiatives for building a common language for evaluating creative work across markets.

The robust training, creative development and creative evaluation activities within Creative X help AB InBev “keep a standard on” how it builds its brands – “regardless of whether a brand is global or local,” Marcondes explains. “This standard can be addressed at scale with multiple brands in different countries.”

Underlying Creative X and all marketing activities at the company is a seven-step approach called ‘One ABI Way of Marketing.’ All members of the marketing division of AB InBev across the world are trained on these seven steps, which outline a full-funnel marketing process, from category and consumer understanding to portfolio strategy, creativity and commercial execution, landing on sustainable value creation.

Marcondes places such a high premium on process because he believes that a regimented approach supports stronger business growth. “We need to have clear philosophies, clear north stars for everything we do and clear processes so that we can behave the same way everywhere,” he says. “This is how we transform our scale and our size as a competitive advantage.”

Inside the ‘megabrands’ and ‘mega platforms’ strategy

Marcondes believes that focus and consistency are twin challenges – and imperatives – for large businesses, particularly in managing global portfolios.

At AB InBev, this belief has been the driver for one of Marcondes’s most successful initiatives: the company’s ‘megabrands’ strategy, which concentrates resources on key labels including Budweiser and Corona to deliver not just visibility but rich, integrated consumer experiences. “It’s all about having focus on the brands that will really carry the responsibility of driving long-term growth and making sure that they will behave as true experience providers to consumers,” he says.

Ensuring AB InBev’s most influential beer labels – Budweiser, Corona and Stella Artois – not only show up visibly in various markets but act as “experience providers,” as Marcondes says, requires investing in large-scale, commercially integrated programs. Internally, Marcondes and his team refer to these as ‘mega platforms.’

By bringing ‘megabrands’ to ‘mega platforms,’ Marcondes aims to enhance brand equity, revenue and returns on investment – all while supporting AB InBev’s long-term financial growth.

The strategy has played out well for the company. Corona, for instance, saw a 10.2% revenue increase outside of Mexico in Q3 2024, contributing to AB InBev’s organic revenue growth of 2.1% during the quarter. Michelob Ultra’s rise to become the top beer on tap in the US further evidences the success of Marcondes’s focused approach.

AB InBev’s ‘megabrands’ strategy is further supported by its success in owning eight of the top 10 most valuable beer brands globally, according to the 2024 BrandZ study by Kantar. Corona was crowned the number one most valuable beer brand in the world for the first time, followed closely by Budweiser.

Innovation in the driver’s seat

Another ingredient in Marcondes’s success at AB InBev is his dedication to innovation – and supercharging consumer experiences with the help of technology.

“Things change very fast and we need to have that mindset of continuously learning every single day,” he says. “That combination of being ambitious and humble is what makes us and our culture here very special. And this connects to [the need] to keep innovating all the time so that we can keep adding value to consumers.”

For one, Marcondes hasn’t let the AI hype pass him by. At AB InBev, his investments in the technology center on enhancing personalization at scale, bringing tailored messages to individual consumers.

“Think of audience segmentation and content customization. It’s all about getting to a point where you evolve from doing mass marketing to [achieving] one-to-one engagement – because we have so much data, and then technology and AI can help us transform that data into a much greater level of audience segmentation. And then we can customize endless types and versions of content to make sure that we will connect with consumers on an individual level, and we will have tailor-made content for different people in different places, during different occasions.”

Generative AI, in particular, has helped AB InBev “take that approach to the next level,” Marcondes says.

He expects that the company’s use of AI and other data-driven technologies in marketing to expand in the coming years, especially considering that 70% of AB InBev’s revenues already stem from digital channels.

DraftLine, the organization’s in-house agency, is also highly focused on fusing data insights with creativity to help drive more effective personalization at scale.

Seizing the Cero moment

Beyond technology, Marcondes is also plugged into the trends that are gaining steam in the market – and is determined to make the most of these moments.

For example, in light of growing demand for low- and zero-ABV offerings, Marcondes has championed the expansion of non-alcoholic beer, notably with Corona Cero’s historic sponsorship of the Paris 2024 Olympics. It was the first time in history that a beer brand served as a global partner to the International Olympic Committee.

And the event embodied the ideal “launch pad” for the Corona Cero brand globally, Marcondes says, because “consumers would be watching the Olympic games throughout the day… it was all about giving consumers the flexibility to have the beer they want, no matter the time of the day or night.”

Building on its success in the world of sports, AB InBev in November inked a deal to become the official beer partner of the Fifa Club World Cup 2025, set to take place in the United States, with Budweiser and Michelob Ultra leading the charge. These initiatives highlight the company’s strategy of connecting its brands to major global events, helping to bring meaningful consumer experiences to life.

The impact of Marcondes’s ethos

Marcondes is steadfast in his belief that creativity can be a top driver for business results.

Translating that belief into action always begins at the top, he says. In his words: “It all starts by having clarity of direction for the whole company. There is no way you can do it unless you have the CEO aligned and supportive, behaving as a champion of building brands and that’s the fortunate situation that we have here at AB InBev. And once it’s clear to everybody that [the best strategy is] to drive organic growth, then [that] growth comes from becoming consumer-centric and brand-led.”

It’s a philosophy that has proven effective time and again under Marcondes’s leadership at AB InBev. In the third quarter of 2024, the organization reported $15.05bn in organic revenue, a 2.1% year-over-year increase.

When asked about his vision for the future of marketing at large, Marcondes doesn’t hesitate. “It’s about time we turn the page on brands being just visible. Brands must add value to people and, by doing that, I really hope we can solidify marketing as a structure – as a group of people – that are drivers of growth. Because what marketers actually do… is behave as the bridge between the commercial teams and consumers so that [the company] can add value to consumers and, as a consequence, build value to the business.

“I really hope that marketing becomes solidified as a true architect of growth.”