Bud Light. National Review.
In store sales of Bud Light has dropped yet again in the last week of April by 26% after a promotional stunt with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney. National Review. Bud Light sales were falling earlier in the month with sales down 11% during the second week of April and 21% during the third week. Sales are down 8% compared to last year and the sales drop may result in parent company Anheuser-Busch losing the number one slot in the beer market. The backlash began after Bud Light partnered with Dylan Mulvaney for a March Madness stunt which was an attempt to expand the brand to new markets, but customers were very upset about it. Sales for Bud Light competitors, including Miller Light and Coors Light have increased.
My Comment:
I've mostly ignored this story until now largely because I'm not really interested in beer that much. I'm certainly not interested in Bud Light. I live in Wisconsin, so if I am having a light beer it's going to be a Miller Light. I'm not much of a drinker though and the vast majority of times it's going to be a locally produced beer like Leinenkugel's or Spotted Cow. I've made the comment many times since this began, this boycott is meaningless for Wisconsin because nobody drinks Bud Light here anyways.
I was also not sure if the boycott was going to actually have legs. Most boycotts don't appear to work and I think I understand why. When Nike hired Colin Kaepernick it didn't hurt their brand much because the people they offended did not buy their product in the first place. Same with other political based boycotts on both sides of the coin, liberals would have little effect boycotting Fox News for example.
Bud Light on the other hand pissed off their core customers. The average light beer drinker wants nothing to do with what they were selling. They are more likely to be conservative and even if they aren't they aren't going to be thrilled to be associated with someone like Dylan Mulvaney. Buying a Bud Light now is embarrassing because you are either declaring yourself a liberal or a member of the LGBT community by buying it.
The timing was absolutely horrible as well. Though the event was largely memory-holed, the controversy erupted right after the horrible shooting in Nashville committed by a transgender person who appears to have done it for political reasons. Introducing a pro-trans advertisement in the wake of a horrible mass shooting that left three children dead was not a good idea by any means. And it comes during a period of time where there have been several major controversies against the transgender activist community. Had they done this last year I don't think the backlash would have been anywhere near as severe.
The other problem is that they did this at a time when the beer market is beyond saturated. Every bar in the country now brews their own beer and light beers aren't anywhere near as popular as they once were. I understand why they wanted to expand the brand but they did it in a way that not only didn't work it angered their most loyal customers.
Their choice of a transgender spokesperson was terrible as well. Mulvaney is bizarre even by the standards of the transgender community, to the point where many people just think he's a flamboyant gay man playing a character. His mannerisms and behavior is disturbing in a way Caitlyn Jenner, for example, is not. He doesn't "pass" at all and he comes across more of a parody then an actual woman, or even "normal" transgender person. Indeed, Mulvaney's bizarre behavior made many people think that it was a misguided April Fools prank.
And this probably isn't fair but when I see a grown man like Mulvaney acting like a little girl my first thought is this person is a pedophile. I don't want to make the accusation because as far as I know nobody has actually made the accusation, but that doesn't mean I don't feel it when I see it. And most people aren't going to be forgiving as I am, especially since accusations of pedophilia, at least some of them which have been substantiated, run rampant in the activist transgender community.
I think a lot of people expected this to blow over but it absolutely has not. People were extremely upset about this and it shows in Bud Light sales. People are still drinking the beer but not anyway near as much as they were. It's going to cause long term damage to the brand. Indeed, the damage might be even worse as some of the damage might not have even shown up yet. I've heard reports of cases and cases of the stuff just sitting on the shelves not moving.
Will companies learn from this? Perhaps. I do think that companies that have the same demographics as customers as Bud Light did should absolutely avoid this kind of virtue signaling. I know that Bud Light has been trying to undo the damage by sending out a patriotic advertisement but people aren't buying it. It just shows that this kind of damage isn't easy to fix.
But I also think that the push for the T portion of LGBT isn't over. The backlash against them is higher then ever but companies want that sweet ESG money. Many of the people in advertising are true believers as well and don't really care if it tanks their company. That certainly appears to be the case with Alissa Heinerscheid, the now removed VP of advertisement at Bud Light.
Regardless, I do think this boycott has legs. This will go down as one of the worst self inflicted wounds a major company has done to itself and may have permanently tainted the Bud Light brand. And for what? Making a tiny percentage of the population, that probably doesn't drink that much beer in the first place, happy? In a sane world this would go down as a great lesson for business schools on how not to do advertising.
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