Let’s face it, Bud Light’s choice to hire transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, thinking it would boost their sales, hasn’t exactly played out as they’d hoped. A year after this misguided attempt, their sales are dropping significantly.
According to a recent report, the revenue of Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, has shrunk 9.1% in the U.S. This comes after Mulvaney, a far cry from Bud Light’s usually patriotic and hardworking customer base, tried to sell the beer by adorning a Katherine Hepburn-inspired getup and snapping social media shots in a Bud Light-filled bathtub. It’s safe to say this publicity stunt crashed and burned.
You see, when a beer traditionally preferred by country-loving Americans is pitched by someone who clearly doesn’t mesh with this demographic, things are bound to go south. The fallout was anything but small – Bud Light lost over $1 billion in sales as consumers across the nation shrugged off the brand.
Bud Light, hoping to regain lost ground, drew on a heavy dose of patriotism and humor in their Super Bowl ads. But the damage was already done, and as Fox Business observed, the brand is still staggering.
Apart from the 9.1% revenue decline in America, “sales to retailers in the U.S. dropped 13.7% during the first quarter,” as per Fox News. It means Bud Light is no longer a sure thing for retailers – they’re not buying it because customers aren’t biting.
As Anson Frericks, ex-President of Operations at Anheuser-Busch, stated, Bud Light’s attempt at being ‘woke’ has been a failure. The consumer trust has taken a hit, and until Bud Light takes some real steps towards reconciliation, Frericks and I agree that the brand’s growth is doomed.
Stories of brands sinking after embracing unnecessary ‘wokeness’ are far from uncommon. Consider Disney, who started cramming ‘woke’ narratives into their parks and programming only to see customer interest collapse. Or Doritos Spain, who faced substantial resistance when they hired a transgender person for their promotion. Similarly, Sports Illustrated tried to be more “body-positive” but ended up slashing jobs due to dropping revenues. And let’s not even get started on the fashion brands that unsuccessfully attempted to gender-neutralize their apparel lines.
The message is clear – consumers aren’t interested in businesses pushing ‘woke’ ideologies. Brands like Bud Light need to remember this or suffer the consequences.
We want our brands unsullied by these politically-correct trends, and Bud Light, it seems, is learning this the hard way.
Chalk this up to another failure of ill-advised ‘wokeness.’ When will these brands realize that this isn’t what we, the customers, want? Our cultural staples shouldn’t be distorted by so-called progressivism. It’s not progress—it’s a fast pass to irrelevance.
