{"id":4842,"date":"2018-06-19T06:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-06-19T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=4842"},"modified":"2018-06-15T16:18:51","modified_gmt":"2018-06-15T21:18:51","slug":"as-usual-there-is-a-great-woman-behind-every-idiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=4842","title":{"rendered":"As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot."},"content":{"rendered":"

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When Catherina Cramer took the leadership role at Warsteiner, she was the ninth generation of Cramer\u2019s to lead the brewery, but the first female in this prominent position.\u00a0\u00a0The brewery had been run by males for eight generations dating back to the early 1700s.<\/p>\n

Catherina had always questioned why Warsteiner Importers Agency did not employ more female employees.\u00a0 Warsteiner\u2019s pay scale was such that when a qualified female was hired, trained and placed in the marketplace, in most cases, the employee would be pouched by a competitor.\u00a0 Inevitably, the competitor could pay a higher salary, give larger bonuses, and had superior, bonus programs, benefits, and typically a car.\u00a0 It was very frustrating and expensive for Warsteiner.<\/p>\n

Decades ago the beer industry was male-dominated.\u00a0 The only females in the business were widows of husbands who had owned distributorships.\u00a0 It was not until I got to Coors of Kansas in the late 70s that we started to recruit women.\u00a0 Breweries were the same way.<\/p>\n

The first brewery to really utilize females was Boston Beers, whose sales director was Ronda Kallman.\u00a0 By design, the sales force of Jim Koch and Ronda Kalman sales was predominately female.\u00a0 Boston Beers\u2019 success with females did not go unnoticed by other breweries.\u00a0 A change was underway.<\/p>\n

In today’s beer industry, women play a major role. Many craft breweries are run and owned by women.\u00a0 Perhaps the best known is Kim Jordan of New Belgium who founded the company over 25 years ago.\u00a0 New Belgium is one of the largest crafts in the country now.<\/p>\n

No woman has led a major U.S. brewery or importer. Last week, however, Heineken appointed Maggie Timoney CEO of their U.S. business.\u00a0 This appointment goes beyond gender, Maggie is the first American to lead Heineken in years.<\/p>\n

Heineken has been in catch-up mode since Corona flew past Heineken as the number one import beer.\u00a0 The acquisition of importing rights years ago, combined with Heineken’s transfer of their distribution from a predominately wine and spirits system to the beer network made an impact on their sales.<\/p>\n

Heineken\u2019s packaging changes, coupled with the long neck bottle, did little to help, and their media programming was questionable at best.\u00a0 Many, if not most, of these decisions,\u00a0were driven by Heineken leaders from Holland.<\/p>\n

The story is the same and, unfortunately, frequently repeats itself: the new leader, not knowing the inner-workings of the U.S. market, initially visits the major wholesalers and gets an ear-full.\u00a0 He then visits key retailers and attains feedback.\u00a0 And, of course, the agency visits are part of the initiation process.\u00a0 The U.S. learning curve is typically about five years.\u00a0 Before this five-year window ends, the CEO is replaced with another CEO and either moved to the home office or is off to “pursue other interests.”<\/p>\n

The industry will be following Maggie Timoney very closely, not because of her gender, but because of what is riding on Heineken’s brands.\u00a0 Many of Heineken\u2019s wholesalers are gold wholesalers, and given what Constellation is doing, Heineken’s time is running short.<\/p>\n

As usual, behind every great woman is an idiot…<\/p>\n

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When Catherina Cramer took the leadership role at Warsteiner, she was the ninth generation of Cramer\u2019s to lead the brewery, but the first female in this prominent position.\u00a0\u00a0The brewery had been run by males for eight generations dating back to the early 1700s. Catherina had always questioned why Warsteiner Importers Agency did not employ more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2xRTi-1g6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4842"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4860,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4842\/revisions\/4860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}