American Thinker Reports: Early in my professional career, an experienced colleague shared with me a bit of advice. 

“If you sell people what they want to buy,” he said, “you’ll have a very successful career. If you sell people what you think they want to buy, you might still be successful. But if you sell people what you want to sell them, you’ll fail miserably.”

It was a free lesson, learned in moments, that was proven true countlessly in nearly two decades of sales and sales management. It is the golden rule in business, for which there are no exceptions or substitutes, and it can be summed up in three short words: know your customer.

Yet this lesson apparently isn’t taught at The Wharton School of Finance, where Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid earned a Master of Business Administration degree, and where tuition and supplies alone will run you $250K for its two-year MBA program. 

Under her leadership and direction, the brand has been irreparably destroyed for the simple reason that she believed herself to have a mandate to sell the customers what she wanted to sell them rather than give them what they would want to buy.