Beer, not Facebook, is the real social network of today. That is the view of Chris Burggraeve, chief marketing officer of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer and owner of global brands such as Budweiser, Beck’s and Stella Artois.

Burggraeve recognises the power of social media - it makes up nearly a fifth of his marketing spend - but he also worries that the world is forgetting how to socialise offline. He laments the sight that greets him as he passes people in their “Starbucks offices” when leaving work each night in New York.

“You can see young people with their computers open sitting there alone in Starbucks while on Facebook. Nobody knows that they are very alone and sad. I would much rather that these people were in a bar enjoying a beer with friends. That is essentially what beer has been doing for millennia. It has brought friends together.”

Burggraeve wants to reconnect the online and real worlds and make social media, well, more sociable. Rather than being an excuse to spend more time communicating with online acquaintances, it should be the springboard for personal interactions with real friends, he argues.

“The word ‘friend’ was there long before Facebook made it sexy. If you could choose between meeting virtually and meeting in the real world, where would you rather meet?”

Evidence of this attitude can be seen on AB InBev’s branded Facebook pages. The UK Stella Artois page asks fans to post where they are going on a night out, while the Beck’s page recommends cultural events such as music gigs. Burggraeve is clearly determined to encourage a social life that doesn’t just involve spending hours attached to a laptop.

He claims not to have a social media strategy - saying that social networks are just a means to an end - but he admits that they are AB InBev’s main mechanism for maintaining brand health. The company has a “fans first” approach to marketing, which means that the “first, second and third dollars” it invests in a brand are dedicated to consumers who have chosen to connect with

the company. These connections might have happened through Facebook and other social networks, but fans also include people who have signed up to the company’s own databases directly. He claims that AB InBev brands have amassed a combined 30 million fans in the past 18 months.

These fans do not just go online to praise their favourite beer: Burggraeve encourages them to co-create marketing. The Beck’s Green Box campaign is one example of how AB InBev has been soliciting direct contributions from fans. It has appealed to creative people from around the world to submit ideas that can be turned into augmented reality artworks. Using a smartphone app, these can be viewed at 30 locations in the UK, US and Italy marked by large green cubes branded by Beck’s.

Fans are considered so integral to AB InBev’s fortunes that the company put quotations from social media sites on the cover of its annual report, which was released on 8 March. In his presentation to analysts, chief executive Carlos Brito credited the ‘fans first’ strategy with “helping us to stay relevant to beer lovers around the world and sustainably grow our business”. Worldwide revenues saw organic growth of 4.6% in 2011, reaching $39bn (£23.4bn).

Social media has proved to be a particularly fruitful way of reaching consumers in China - AB InBev’s fastest-growing market and also the world’s biggest beer market. In the course of its rapid economic expansion, Burggraeve says that China has skipped several phases of marketing evolution, with consumers there leapfrogging older media straight to social networks.

The financial value of a fan who has chosen to engage, compared with a consumer who has not, is a figure that Burggraeve claims to have quantified, though he doesn’t reveal it. He knows why he wants fans, and last year devoted 18% of his budget to attracting and connecting with them. Indeed, some of AB InBev’s local brands are now marketed almost exclusively through social media.

“Fans are our brand ambassadors. If you take our 30 million fans, the influence and amplification potential is huge,” Burggraeve says.

But while beer can be a force for uniting friends, it has been known to have the opposite effect, and the alcohol industry has a self-imposed duty to encourage young people in particular to drink in moderation. Although Burggraeve admits “we are a business, and I would like people to learn to drink”, he acknowledges that AB InBev depends on friends to spread messages about responsible drinking between one another (see Q&A, below).

This is because in the UK, for example, the law states that alcohol ads can’t be targeted at anyone under the legal drinking age of 18, while Advertising Standards Authority regulations dictate that people appearing in them must not appear to be below 25.

The hope is that word of mouth marketing, as well as spreading the message of responsibility, will improve the business’ brand health.

His definition of this - and the ongoing measure of marketing performance at AB InBev - is an increasing willingness from consumers to pay more as time goes on.

It is also the company’s main route to growth. Instilling a premium positioning in its brands, so that consumers spend progressively more on them, is especially important in developing markets where volume sales have reached a plateau. So too is the development of new products, such as Stella Artois Cidre, Stella Artois 4 and Beck’s Vier.

One of the ways the business is hoping to push this premium positioning of brands is via live events. Taking advantage of sports properties, such as Budweiser’s sponsorship of football’s World Cup and the FA Cup in England, also demonstrates AB InBev’s strategy of associating its brands with shared experiences.

“You want to see a football game live with your mates. You want to be there, and you ideally want to be together,” says Burggraeve.

The company’s marketing is adapting to changing media consumption habits, taking into account that while watching live football on TV, viewers are also likely to be using their phones, computers and tablet devices to browse the internet and social media. Brand advertising, therefore, aims to surround the consumer with different connection points that reflect their interactions on the different screens.

We need to be careful not to deny happiness to the large majority for the foolishness of a few. We would rather forget the sales volume we get from irresponsible drinkers

Although AB InBev still uses traditional 30-second TV spots to promote its better known brands, Burggraeve says that he no longer thinks about TV as a medium in itself, only as part of a broader video strategy.

“The pressure of social media forces the so-called traditional media like TV to reinvent itself,” he says. As an example of this, he points to Budweiser’s own TV series, The Big Time. In the reality show broadcast on US network ABC, contestants play for a chance to realise their dreams in sport and fashion, for example. Footage that didn’t make the final cut for each hour-long show has been extensively exploited online and among Budweiser’s fans (see Marketer2Marketer, below).

Burggraeve argues that changes in how consumers use media require marketers to retrain, in order to understand the relationships they have with brands. It also means re-examining how marketers think about their budgets.

According to AB InBev’s annual report, sales and marketing costs across the company were more than $5bn (£3.2bn) in 2011, a 9% increase on 2010. It represents virtually the same proportion of annual revenues, though, at 13%. Despite the rise in spending, Burggraeve claims that the company applies zero-based budgeting “as a way of life”.

That means any spending has to be justified, so the priority is to be as efficient as possible with as little money as possible, rather than securing greater budgets from the organisation. Once again, the only measure that matters is creating sustainable brand health - in other words, the willingness of consumers to pay progressively more.

“If you can do that with less funds, why wouldn’t you? If digital was to be a way to do that more efficiently, why wouldn’t you shift?” says Burggraeve. He acknowledges that the shift he refers to at AB InBev will involve less spending on TV and other traditional media in exchange for more focus on funding the fans first strategy.

He uses a simple analogy of a restaurant owner to explain his spending philosophy. The restaurateur’s ideal marketing investment is zero because if the food, service and location are consistently excellent, diners will come back and will tell their friends. It is a message that Burggraeve evangelises about, not only inside AB InBev but also to the marketing profession as a whole in his role as president of the World Federation of Advertisers.

This does not necessarily mean that the world needs fewer marketers. Burggraeve says that he would hire a marketer before setting a marketing budget, but he has no time for marketers who complain about being restricted by their budgets. “Those marketers can go somewhere else.”

He says the latest generation of marketers accept that in today’s technological world “you can move a mountain with very limited funds”. The only additional requirement is an understanding of human nature.

“They make lemonade out of very few lemons,” says Burggraeve. “That kind of frugality is what we need in marketers. Analysts ask me ‘Have you increased your marketing budget?’, but they should be asking ‘What has happened to your brand health?’”

Despite his willingness to move away from traditional approaches to marketing, Burggraeve claims that nothing has really changed over time in the marketer’s core areas of responsibility. Brand health is only his expression of what marketers have long sought to create for their brands. And the marketer’s job is still to move forward whatever behavioural and attitudinal measures lie at the heart of brand health for the company.

“Marketers need to have curiosity, they need to have empathy and they need to be good anthropologists to understand and uncover insights that will drive behaviour, attitudes or perception.

“That is what matters. How do you move those people? Do it as cleverly as possible, but move them. If you don’t move them, you’re not in marketing.”