Budweiser is the flagship lager of Anheuser-Busch InBev — the world's largest brewer at $59.4 billion in 2024 revenue under global CEO Michel Doukeris — and the brand at the center of the most consequential U.S. beer-market shift since Prohibition. Modelo Especial, distributed in the U.S. by Constellation Brands under CEO Bill Newlands, took the top-selling beer position from Bud Light in May 2023 after the Dylan Mulvaney boycott and has held it; Yuengling under sixth-generation president Dick Yuengling and his daughters quietly became the largest American-owned brewery; Athletic Brewing under co-founder Bill Shufelt cleared $90 million in 2023 revenue selling non-alcoholic beer in a category that did not meaningfully exist five years earlier.
By EPR Editorial Team · Edited on Jun 18, 2026
Four brands, four operating models, one collapsing category. Total U.S. beer volume dropped 5.1% in 2023 and another 2.5% in 2024 per Beer Marketer's Insights, the steepest sustained decline in modern brewing history. The marketing playbooks that won the 2010s are not winning the 2020s, and Budweiser is the case file every operator in the category now studies.
The Bud Light collapse, in operating terms
In April 2023, Bud Light's vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid approved a one-off Instagram partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney — a personalized can sent for the NCAA basketball tournament. The boycott response from country-music audiences and conservative consumers was unprecedented in scale: Bud Light volume dropped 28% by July 2023, never recovered, and the brand lost the U.S. top-seller position to Modelo Especial within four weeks. Brendan Whitworth, then-CEO of Anheuser-Busch U.S., did not publicly defend the campaign for nearly two weeks; by the time AB responded, the narrative had set. Bud Light volume in 2024 was still down 25%-plus from pre-boycott levels.
The marketing lessons are operational, not political. First, single-influencer activations carry brand-wide risk that the activation team does not see at approval. Second, response time is the variable that separates contained incidents from sustained collapses — Whitworth's delayed statement was studied at Harvard Business School within twelve months as the canonical case in modern crisis communications failure. Third, distributor relationships are an underweighted PR audience; the wholesalers who carried Bud Light into bars and stores were among the loudest internal critics, and their public statements compounded the consumer reaction. Doukeris reorganized the U.S. business in late 2023 and has rebuilt against the lessons, but the Bud Light share never returned.
Modelo: how Constellation built the new U.S. category leader
Modelo Especial's ascent to U.S. number-one was not an accident of the Bud Light failure. Constellation Brands CEO Bill Newlands and chief marketing officer Jim Sabia ran a 15-year deliberate climb. The strategy was three-layered. First, Hispanic-market roots — Modelo was already the leading beer in U.S. Hispanic households by 2015, and the brand was treated as a heritage product, not a translation. Second, the "Fighting Spirit" brand platform, anchored by sports sponsorships (UFC, the Canelo Álvarez partnership, MLS, the Los Angeles Football Club) that built non-Hispanic awareness without diluting the heritage position. Third, premium pricing held — Modelo Especial costs roughly 12% more per six-pack than Bud Light at most retailers, and Constellation refused to discount through the 2023 share gain.
The result is structural. Modelo Especial in 2024 generated approximately $9.3 billion in U.S. retail sales — the largest single beer brand by dollar volume in U.S. history. Corona Extra, also distributed by Constellation, holds the third spot. Newlands' beer business produced 80% of Constellation's 2024 profit, against a wine and spirits portfolio that was sold down through 2024 and 2025. The marketing-driven concentration of beer share is now the company.
Yuengling: the American-owned outlier
D.G. Yuengling & Son under sixth-generation president Dick Yuengling and his daughters Jennifer, Wendy, Debbie, and Sheryl is the largest American-owned brewery — a position the company holds because the three brewers larger than it (Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, and Constellation's import portfolio) are all owned by Belgian, South African-Canadian, and partially-Mexican parent companies. Yuengling cleared 2.8 million barrels in 2024, expanded into Texas via a joint venture with Molson Coors in 2021, and reached 27 states. The brand has never run a Super Bowl ad. The marketing strategy is geographic discipline and operational scarcity.
The Yuengling case file matters because it is the inversion of the AB InBev model. Spend almost nothing on national advertising. Refuse to enter a state until distribution can support sustained demand. Treat the brand's 1829 founding date and family ownership as durable assets that imported global brewers cannot replicate. The Hispanic and traditional-American positioning that Modelo earned by heritage, Yuengling earned by lineage — and the brand benefited from the same consumer shift away from globally-owned beer that lifted Modelo.
Athletic Brewing: the non-alcoholic category Bill Shufelt invented
Bill Shufelt left a finance career in 2017 to launch Athletic Brewing with brewmaster John Walker. The non-alcoholic beer category was less than 0.5% of U.S. beer volume at the time — a rounding error. By 2024, non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beer was the fastest-growing segment in the category, and Athletic Brewing's share inside it was estimated above 19% of dollar sales per Circana scanner data. The company's 2023 revenue cleared $90 million, with reported 2024 revenue exceeding $200 million.
The marketing strategy is the inverse of mass-market beer. Founder visibility — Shufelt is the public face, with personal narrative around endurance sports and sobriety-curious culture. Retail-first distribution — Whole Foods, Costco, Trader Joe's, and Target carried Athletic before the brand built broad bar coverage, because the buyer in 2018-2020 was a grocery shopper, not a bar patron. Earned media saturation — Shufelt sat for hundreds of podcast interviews, runs the company's LinkedIn presence personally, and turned Athletic into the most-cited brand in the non-alcoholic category inside AI engine answers. The category did not exist; the marketing built the category, and Athletic's share inside the category it built has held against eight major-brewer entrants.
What the four operating models share
One common thread runs through Modelo's ascent, Yuengling's quiet expansion, Athletic's category creation, and Bud Light's collapse: distributor and retailer relationships now operate as PR audiences, not just sales channels. Constellation's Newlands and Sabia run quarterly forums for top distributors that double as brand-strategy reviews. Yuengling's wholesaler relationships are multi-generational. Athletic's Shufelt personally calls top retail buyers. Bud Light's Heinerscheid did not — and the silence from distributors after the boycott was the second-largest blow to the brand, after the consumer reaction itself.
The AI engine layer beer brands are now competing inside
When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews "what's the best Mexican lager," "what's the largest American-owned brewery," or "best non-alcoholic beer," the named brands are determined by the citation graph the engines pull from. Modelo, Yuengling, and Athletic each dominate their respective query clusters inside AI engine answers. Budweiser and Bud Light still rank for legacy historical queries but no longer dominate growth-segment queries. The marketing function in beer now includes a Citation Share workstream that did not exist as a line item in 2020.
Where the category goes next
Three trends define the next 36 months. First, premium and import beer continues to take share from domestic mainstream — Modelo, Corona, Heineken, Stella Artois grow, Bud Light and Miller Lite decline. Second, non-alcoholic and craft hybrids accelerate; Heineken 0.0, Athletic, Guinness 0.0, and Corona Non-Alcoholic each grew triple-digits in 2023-2024. Third, hard seltzer continues to recede from its 2021 peak — White Claw and Truly hold the remaining demand, but the category is now half its peak size. AB InBev under Doukeris, Constellation under Newlands, Molson Coors under Gavin Hattersley, and Heineken under Dolf van den Brink will compete inside a category that is structurally smaller than it was five years ago, which makes Citation Share, distributor relationships, and brand-trust assets more valuable per unit of demand than ever.
