Filed under: Deals, Management, Marketing and advertising, Entrepreneurs, Eastern Europe

This post is one of several on business heirs apparent. Let us know in the comments whether you think Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken’s heir should take up the reigns of Heineken, and be sure to check out the other heir apparent posts.

It was Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken’s dad, Alfred “Freddie” Heineken, who built the family business from a small Dutch brewer into Europe’s largest brewing empire. A well-known bon vivant, he was friendly with the Dutch royal family, and his sense of humor didn’t abandon him even after a three-week kidnapping ordeal in 1983: he claimed that his kidnappers tortured him by making him drink Carlsburg.

On Freddie’s death in 2003, his heir apparent and only child, Charlene, became the wealthiest woman in the Netherlands, now worth more than $7 billion. She lives a more low-key life in London with her five kids and stock broker, and former Olympic skier, husband. She continues to hold the controlling stake in Heineken, though she hasn’t been as involved in the company day-to-day as her father was. She told a family biographer that she intends to keep the business together until her heir apparent, her eldest son, is old enough to take on the mantle.

Heineken hasn’t been running on cruise control, however. It just announced a plan to build a brewery in South Africa and has continued its expansion into central and eastern Europe by acquiring Romanian Brewer Bere Mures. But the biggest news recently is Heineken’s joint venture with Carlsberg to buy up and break apart British brewer Scottish & Newcastle, a deal which was just approved by EU regulators. Under the terms of the deal, Heineken will take control of S&N’s British, Belgian, and Indian operations, while Carlsburg gets those in Russia, Greece, and China.

Unless something unexpected happens, when Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken passes the reins to her son, he’ll be taking over a brewing company larger than Anheuser-Busch Cos. (NYSE: BUD). In the meantime, the Heineken company retains a sense of humor, at least as far as its advertising goes:

Also be sure to check out the other heir apparent posts.

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Filed under: Management, Marketing and advertising, Estee Lauder (EL), Entrepreneurs

This post is one of several on business heirs apparent. Let us know in the comments whether you think Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer should take up the reigns of Estee Lauder, and be sure to check out the other heir apparent posts.

A cosmetics empire might seem the ultimate in puffery, the very materialization of vanity. But the venerable empire built by Estee Lauder and her powerhouse son, Leonard, has turned makeup into a very real financial juggernaut. And Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, Leonard’s niece, is not only the public face of the company but also the considerable creative brain of its marketing soul.

As granddaughter of the company’s founder, Aerin is surely far-removed from the hardscrabble life that was The Estee Lauder Companies Inc (NYSE: EL) beginnings. She is a child of great wealth and, as such, is the inheritor not just of money and corporate responsibility but also of appearances. Aerin is not just the face of the company, but of a certain sense of style; her choices, from her cutlery to the clothing her two boys wear to (of course) her lip gloss, are signals to a certain subset of the fashion world. Aerin isn’t just the harbinger of styles, she is a style.

Can one go from being the face of a company to its head? If anyone is positioned to do so, it’s Aerin. She didn’t just grow up in the center of the fashion world, but in the center of the “old American money” world; her best friends are Lauren duPont and Renee Rockefeller, and they’ve been teaching her the ways of the powerful since she was a child.

And as head of Global Advertising for Estee Lauder, Aerin has demonstrated a knack for creating a unified brand image, as well as controlling the details and delivering the corp-speak when required. Her public sound bites always come off perfectly, much like her society photographs, always with perfect skin and a glowing smile.

While perfect skin might not be a resume requirement for most corporations, for Estee Lauder, nothing could be more important. Having publicly stated that she, like her grandmother, doesn’t believe in research or focus groups, Aerin must be the customer (or, more to the point, be the person the customer wants to be). So maybe her relative youth is an asset? It’s certainly the message the Estee Lauder corporate communication folk seem to be delivering. And the media seems to be licking it up like a child wearing a thick application of fruit-flavored lip gloss.

Also be sure to check out the other heir apparent posts.

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