Bud Light in Freefall
Let’s check in on Bud Light. You’ll recall that an agency working for AB InBev (ABI) sent a popular influencer a personalized can of Bud Light to celebrate her year of transition. As a response to this act of kindness and celebration of diversity, certain quarters of the population freaked out, calling for a boycott. The company axed two marketing execs, hoping to appease the offended. How’s that going? Well:
“Anheuser-Busch InBev's Bud Light [volumes] plunged 28.4% for the week ending May 13 per new Nielsen data. That's a faster pace than the 27.7% decline the week before.”
The damage extended beyond Bud Light, as well, to other ABI brands: “Nielsen's data … showed a 6.8% decline in the volume of Michelob Ultra, a 14.9% decrease in Budweiser, and an 8.5% fall in Natural Light.”
This is an incredible collapse, vastly more consequential than anyone expected.* Perusing the news last week, it appeared that a consensus was emerging about what was happening: the boycott was working. (Stories were often paired with news about a similar anti-Pride backlash at Target.) Carlos Laboy, a financial analyst, offered a typical take: “If Budweiser and Bud Light are iconic American ideas that have long brought consumers together, why did these marketers fail to invite new consumers without alienating the core base of the firm’s largest brand?”
But what if this take is wrong?
Everyone Hates Bud
Laboy’s observation seems obvious enough, but he cites no data to back it up. We don’t know who’s abandoning Bud. But we do have two solid data points that might give us a hint:
Boycotts rarely work, and when they do, it’s a marginal effect. In some cases, there’s a boycott backlash and sales actually improve. I know of no case where a boycott produced anything close to Bud Light’s collapse.
Americans have complex feelings about trans identity, but by more than six-to-one, they oppose disenfranchising trans folks.
Analysis like Laboy’s rest on two pretty big assumptions: 1) that the core base of Bud Light are anti-trans, and 2) that catering to conservative mores is normal, while reaching out to a broader audience is the “alienating” position.
There is a more obvious explanation. In abandoning Dylan Mulvaney, the trans influencer, Bud failed to appease the group most theatrically outraged, but managed to turn off a whole new group who were disgusted by ABI’s response. Sales may be down because of the boycott, but it’s far more likely that they’re down such huge amounts because regular drinkers walked.
Marketing in a polarized world is really hard for large corporations who depend on mass support. In order to keep that huge audience or grow, they have to reach out to everyone. Yet when the very act of reaching out becomes politically unacceptable for another group, companies face a catch-22.
The calculation is going to vary for each business. What works for Nike won’t work for Chick-Fil-A. That said, there’s a real danger in over-valuing conservative voices. They are amplified by a network of conservative media, and that in turn attracts mainstream attention. But in many cases the “extreme” view—the one held by a fringe group out of the mainstream—are the loudest ones. Incentives among conservative media and politics favor outrage, and on any given week, a new issue, company, or person will be the target. Yet almost all of these vanish in a few days if no one feeds them.
On the other hand, a company can do real and lasting damage to the much larger portion of its customer base by catering to this outrage. Prior to the Dylan Mulvaney incident, the Human Rights Campaign gave Anheuser-Busch a perfect score for LGBTQ advocacy. That’s gone, and it could be decades before folks concerned about LGBTQ rights trust them again.
Bud Light should hit bottom at some point. That’s not the end of this, by a long shot. Then the question will be: how do we rebuild the brand when no one trusts us? That problem is going to be a lot harder to solve than the one that erupted over their support for trans drinkers. Other companies should pay attention.
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* The Oracle of Oregon (TM) in April: “Sales will stabilize eventually…”