Marketing capability-building for a portfolio of founder-operated craft brands.

AB InBev’s Craft & Specialties portfolio at ZX Ventures was a global collection of small consumer brands, most of them operated by the people who’d founded or brewed them. They knew beer and small business. Marketing wasn’t their specialty, and they didn’t have full marketing organizations behind them. The gap between what those operators needed to know about marketing and what they had time or training to learn on their own was a real constraint on what the brands could do.

I was the marketing capability provider for the C&S portfolio. The work was building the resources, programming, and recurring intelligence that gave operators a way to make better marketing decisions without becoming marketing executives.

We built three things to do it. A Digital Marketing Toolkit I authored as a practical decision aid for operators who needed to make real spending and channel choices each quarter. Learnflix, an “edutainment” video series we produced in partnership with an external production agency and distributed across the portfolio’s marketers; it picked up real usage and a 4.6/5 rating from early users. And the Global Craft Beer Trends quarterly reports, a recurring publication that gave operators the kind of category intelligence the main AB InBev portfolio took for granted.

The years since haven’t been gentle to AB InBev’s craft portfolio. The US craft brands were largely divested to Tilray in 2023. Birra del Borgo was restructured in 2024. Craft beer as a category has been under macro pressure across most of the period. The brands that did grow through it (Camden Town being the clearest example, growing roughly 30% post-acquisition and investing in new UK brewing capacity) are exactly the kind of brands the capability investments were built for. The programs we built weren’t going to fix the category’s macro headwinds. What they did do was give operators a sharper read on the marketing decisions that determined how they navigated them.