AB InBev: One Step Builds the Next
The Situation
AB InBev set a goal to double the size of the business by 2020, and marketing had to help get there. The company already had a global Marketing Excellence Program, a single process every brand team followed to plan, brief, launch and measure their work. It scored high on compliance. It wasn’t delivering results. I was brought in through the agency to help the program’s lead turn it into something brand teams around the world would actually use.
What Was Actually Broken
The program had become a year-end requirement. Brand directors filled it out to be evaluated, not to make decisions. Everything a marketer needed was technically in there, buried in a loosely organized site of downloadable documents, duplicated templates and competing versions of the same file. The lead client knew the content was the problem. What she didn’t have was a way through it. She was being asked to sift a mountain of material, decide what mattered, consolidate it, and turn it into a process she could train other marketers on, inside a highly competitive culture where the pressure on her showed up in every session.
The Turning Point
The workshops were about breaking the problem into pieces small enough to decide on. Each session ended with something clear enough that I could take it back, on my own or with the design team, and turn it into a next step. That step became the starting point for the following session. Content got audited, then sorted, then consolidated, then built into pages. Features were prioritized against 18 needs brand directors actually had and 10 requirements the business set, so the build reflected how marketers worked rather than what the old system enforced.
What Changed
The program stopped being a pile of documents and became a sequenced process with a clear path through it. The lead client went from facing the mountain alone to owning a structure she understood well enough to launch with confidence and train others on. I led the design team through the build, scoped and phased so it could launch in stages instead of waiting on everything at once.
Frank’s Take
A process people are evaluated on will get completed. That isn’t the same as a process people use. The difference is almost never the content, which is usually all there already. It’s whether someone has broken it into decisions small enough to make and sequenced them so each one builds the next. Pressure makes that harder to see from inside, which is exactly when it needs doing.