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Bud Light just keeps on losing customers

This is craziness:

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer, said Thursday its U.S. sales, profit and market share had all fallen sharply in the second quarter as consumers abandoned Bud Light following a promotion it did with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

....The company’s market share has been stable since the last week of April through to the end of June, said [CEO Michael Doukeris], while Bud Light’s share is following a similar trajectory....Overall, AB InBev’s second-quarter U.S. sales to wholesalers dropped 15% and sales to retailers dropped 14%, mainly because of the decline in Bud Light.

The decline in sales of Bud Light did indeed slow down in June, but nonetheless it's still going down. Market share of Bud Light since the Mulvaney boycott started has plummeted by a third, from 10% to 6.8%.

And all of this is over a minor online promotion that probably nobody gave a second thought to. I don't normally feel any empathy for gigantic multinational beer companies, but I feel sorry for Budweiser. There's no way they could have predicted that this would cause the MAGA right to go completely insane.

70 thoughts on “Bud Light just keeps on losing customers

  1. rick_jones

    It would seem that Bud Light or perhaps light beer in general, is an easily replaced quantity. Ergo “caveat brewor”

    1. Eve

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  2. MattBallAZ

    The need to hate (another tribe) is just overwhelming in many. Blacks, Jews, homosexuals, trans.
    None of them ever seem to consider that history never judges haters well.

  3. Ugly Moe

    it is odd to boycott something without a demand. Are boycotters looking for a hateful tirade from InBev, perhaps with banging a shoe on a table?

    1. MF

      Why? The message is clear. If your product has a big working class market you enter the culture wars on the liberal side at extreme peril.

      Every dollar of damage to Anheuser Busch reinforces that. If the company goes bankrupt it is even clearer. Why confuse things with demands?

      In addition, who could possibly issue a demand? This is mass consumer revulsion, not an organized boycott.

      1. Salamander

        So, what you're saying is that "liberals" don't "work"? As in "working class"?

        Also, that tweetstorms and soc-media frenzies are not "organized"?

        I doubt both.

        On the other hand, I do agree with you: Who knew that Bud Lite was the beer of maga-repubs and incels?? Maybe because it's cheap? Because they think they can lose a few pounds if they drink it, instead of regular?

        In-Bev needs to figure out what attracted these wingnuts to Bud Lite (versus regular Bud or aother brewski) so they can tune a (different) product's advertising to their base (heh) desires.

      2. Crissa

        So you're saying that trans and gay people, who've been drinking and marketed to by Bud Light for decades, are just not entering the culture wars?

  4. cld

    I don't know, I think I could have predicted it.

    The demo Dylan Mulvaney appeals to isn't going to like Bud Light, while the demo that does like Bud Light was already over it and just needed a little more incentive to find something marginally better --and they're exactly the people who like nothing better than finding a way to cause harm by doing nothing at all, such as not drinking beer they weren't liking anyway and putting it on parade.

    1. kahner

      yeah, seems very predictable to me. i'm surprised by the magnitude and duration of the response, but the backlash was pretty par for the course.

      1. cld

        Oh, when was the last time you had a Bud Light? Was it --three decades ago?

        At the drive-in. With Dylan Mulvaney's grandad. In Frostbite Falls.

        1. Crissa

          I mean... yeah, but I don't drink alot of beer in the first place?

          But the beer that's are Prode, and gay bars was always Bud Light. They drove their trucks in our parades, supported our events and provided the libations for our after-protest parties.

    2. mart

      Really easy to find and stay with a taste neutral low alcohol mild flavored beer or seltzer - if it confirms your MAGA manhood.

    3. J. Frank Parnell

      The Dylan Mulvaney thing was intended to be a small (micro?) scale outreach to the young. Bud Light has reportedly been losing market share for decades. Their problem is similar to Harly-Davidson's, their customers are dying from old age and not being replaced by new recruits from the young. There seems to be no easy way for them to reach out to a new market segment without pissing of their existing but declining customer base.

  5. jte21

    A-B's problem was that Bud Light's key customer demographic consisted mostly of older white dudes and they need to appeal to a younger, hipper demographic if they wanted to grow market share and so did this (rather minor) promotion with a trans influencer in hopes of appearing cool and inclusive and all that. What blew up in their faces is that those older white dudes were a bunch of bigoted snowflakes who could not bear the idea that they would be drinking the same watery swill as some trans girl and simply lost their shit and switched to drinking some other watery swill to satisfy their easily-threatened, manly thirst.

  6. JimStrain

    I also feel some empathy toward the manufacturer, and if the product were something that I could possibly use, I would buy some of it. Unfortunately, I'm not rich enough to spend money on something that I don't really like, just to counteract the bigotry of the MAGA crowd.

    1. Salamander

      Yes! I was in the Costco yesterday, and gave some consideration to buying a pack of Bud Lite out of some misplaced sympathy and revolt. Just for a moment, though. I prefer IPAs, so I bought 7K instead.

  7. Christof

    Well I WOULD have felt some sympathy for Bud Light, and maybe would have even bought some support beer (that's a thing), if they hadn't immediately sucked up to the morons and throw Mulvaney under the bus. So screw them.

    1. geordie

      Yep, Bud Light had a boycott start because they pissed off the MAGAs and then they backpedalled and pissed off the liberals. These days that doesn't leave a lot of customers.

  8. tango

    This is a significant precedent. Previously, the Left was more effective at exercising boycotts and economic muscle and corporate America was therefore solicitous of their causes. But with this and other recent events, it looks like the Right is also organizing to pressure corporations.

    Companies are going to be very careful to not do things that provoke the Right now, which is a non inconsequential victory for the Right.

  9. Wichitawstraw

    It's because Bud Light apologized for the promotion which of course did nothing to appease MAGA and made sure that the left wouldn't come to their aid. It's a master class in what not to do in a made up controversy. But let's also be clear that Bud Light was on a decline before any of this happened.

  10. orion

    It's the Tom Cruise effect of jumping on the couch. Just like that shattered his cultivated image as an action hero a bit, this ad shattered the cultivated image of Bud Light as the rugged man's beer (football and nascar). It was never good beer to begin with, and after the ad (and reaction) they were just left with piss water in a can.

    1. Crissa

      Dude, it was never a rugged man'a beer. It was the beer you drank while liatening to lesbian standup or drunken renditions of 'In the Navy'.

  11. golack

    I remember reading a while back that the question shouldn't be why sells fell for Bud Light, but why were they ever that high?

  12. KJK

    The movie "Barbie" is doing great notwithstanding the "MAGA right going completely insane". If AB had that type of Bud Light promotion for an artisanal IPA brand (even if produced at a big AB brewery), they would have been fine.

    I guess the demographic for Bud Light is older, white, overweight, truck driving, country music loving, NASCAR watching men?

    The "Barbie" movie would be a big MAGA hit if it was about Klaus Barbie.

  13. different_name

    I'm increasingly convinced that people just realized Bud Light tastes like piss.

    People switched for a while to some other beer over their trendly little hatefest, realized what a gross beer Bud is, and sensibly kept drinking something better.

      1. Salamander

        Thank you. I get so tired of snobs who describe flavors in sickening ways that just prove they don't have taste buds anymore AND have never sampled the beverage.

  14. Five Parrots in a Shoe

    What "different name" said above. Bud Light is, and always has been, piss. I've never understood why anyone drank it, since life is too short to drink bad beer.

    I feel pity for A-B since they were trying to be inclusive and got hammered for it. But they've been selling piss for decades, so my pity for them is limited.

    1. Special Newb

      The funny things is they put their market share at risk to go after a market that already hated their product. Thats why Heinerscheid should be fired if she hasn't been already. It was a dumb play.

  15. KinersKorner

    Sell it for 10 bucks a case as a summer promotion. The Natty Lite buyers we’ll step up and buy it. Suck it up for awhile and people will come back. Bud light is the worst light beer anyway.

  16. HokieAnnie

    Bud lite is as awful as everyone else said and yes beer drinking is in decline. I sure hope it doesn't kill the craft beer market, I love a great bear but loathe the mass market crap, I never drank beer much until the craft revolution hit in the 1990s.

  17. Leo1008

    As usual, I will happily do what I can to make myself unpopular by making points that seem obvious to me.

    "And all of this is over a minor online promotion that probably nobody gave a second thought to ... There's no way they could have predicted that this would cause the MAGA right to go completely insane."

    The ongoing Bud Light controversy is not over a minor online promotion. That much should be obvious. If there really were nothing other than a minor online promotion, then the scale of the controversy would almost certainly be less.

    So, what is the actual issue driving continued sales declines for Bud Light? I'm going to suggest that an inability to at least consider some fault on the Left is a sign of a huge blind spot.

    To me it seems fairly clear that Bud Light did a pretty effective job of associating itself with a highly unpopular gender ideology. To be clear, I'm not referring to trans people in general or even Dylan Mulvaney in particular. Rather, I'm referring to the gender ideologues who have all but completely subsumed the movement for trans rights and accommodations. Those ideologues, and their ideas, are unpopular. And, rightly or wrongly, Bud Light now appears to be identified with them. That's what "all of this" is about.

    "There's no way they could have predicted that this would cause the MAGA right to go completely insane."

    This whole situation could have and should have been incredibly easy to predict. Again, failing to make such easy predictions reveals quite the blind spot on the part of the Ad executives (now on leave) who spearheaded Bud Light's promotion with Dylan Mulvaney.

    My own view may be considered toxic in Lefty circles, but the polling I have read about indicates that my opinion is more or less in line with majority views: this was a very bad time for Bud Light to associate itself with the trans rights movement. That movement needs to moderate. It needs to purge itself of the extremists. Some of its demands, such as those involving women's sports teams, are both deeply unpopular and quite easy to identify as unfair.

    And until the trans rights movement moderates, companies have to be very deep inside some kind of epistemological bubble not to realize the fire they are playing with by associating with that movement in any way.

    1. Crissa

      'Highly unpopular' is keyword for 'Leo is a bigot'.

      Bud Light has been advertising at Pride and in queer media for three decades. Glad you can show up and tell is we're 'unpopular' now and don't deserve beer.

      1. Leo1008

        From "The Democrats’ Nonwhite Working-Class Problem Re-Emerges" by Ruy Teixeira:

        "Data from a recent 6,000 respondent survey conducted by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) exposes these contradictions by allowing the views of moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters to be examined in detail. My analysis shows the following differences between the Democratic Party and nonwhite working-class voters:

        "Transgender athletes in team sports. Should 'transgender athletes… be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity' or should they 'only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?' By a staggering 70 to 26 percent, moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters chose the second option, that sports team participation should be determined by birth gender, directly contradicting current Democratic Party doctrine. But nonwhite and white college grad liberals are exactly the reverse, endorsing the Democrats’ gender identity stance by 40 points each. Again, it is easy to see to whom today’s Democratic Party is really listening."

        How did a company like Bud Light miss these points? And how long can the Left go on pretending that the Bud Light controversy is little if not nothing more than an explosion of MAGA hatred?

        We ignore the legitimate concerns of significant demographic groups at our own enormous electoral peril. And if trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, we are arguably committing political malpractice of the highest order, with our democracy in the balance, by shunning if not demonizing anyone perceived to be lacking in sufficient ideological purity.

          1. Leo1008

            The Left purports to be the racially inclusive and broadminded supporter of minorities;

            unless, of course, those minorities actually have the nerve to think for themselves and thereby wind up rejecting the tenets of progressive orthodoxy.

            There's a joke I've heard or read about conservatism more times than I can remember, but I don't hear it much anymore. The reason may be that it now seems to apply more to the Left:

            Progressivism cannot fail, it can only be failed.

            1. Crissa

              Uh-huh. These minorities you're happily promoting lies about?

              Transgender people aren't trying to take over sports. All kids want to do is compete with everyone else. Why support harassment of them?

              You focus on trans women by showing your misogyny.

        1. Crissa

          Why do you use so many words to lie?

          You basically never answer the question.

          Why did you just use the fallacy ad populum? Just because bigots exist, doesn't mean they're right.

        2. kennethalmquist

          “...directly contradicting current Democratic Party doctrine.”

          Evidence? The word “transgender” appears fifteen times in the Democratic Party platform, and I checked them all. The platform doesn't say that transgender athletes should “be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity.”

          For that matter, I haven't heard that Bud Light asserted that transgender athletes should “be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity.”

  18. Bluto_Blutarski

    Zero symathy here. I stopped buying all AB InBev products after the CEO apologized to the bigots and made his contempt for the LGBTQ community clear. Most of my friends are now boycotting not only Bud Light but all other AB products. Hope they spiral into bakruptcy.

    1. cld

      Is this really a thing? Is there a general left boycott-in-reaction-to-a-reaction-to-a-boycott that's affecting Anheuser-Busch in a documentable way?

      I have to admit I've felt the same way but haven't bothered figuring out what their other products are.

  19. Lounsbury

    As polling indicates that the backlash on the Intello Left Bohemian Bourgeoisie (bobo as we say in French) heavy lean into rapid and comparatively radical gender concept reframing is broad, not just MAGA (EG https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/05/trans-poll-gop-politics-laws/) seeing this as as MAGA is quite the error.

    Quite aside from moral righteousness, it is quite clear the educated urbanite Bobo Left has gotten very hard ahead of where sustainable politics are.

    And pretending this is merely MAGA is an error.

  20. rokeeffeDC

    It wasn't so much the engagement with DM as it was that Budweiser’s vice president of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, denigrated, in the most condescending and snarky manner, BL's target customer base as "out of touch" and "fratty." I truly believe there would have been little damage done without that video, which threw gasoline on the fire.

  21. name99

    "There's no way they could have predicted that this would cause the MAGA right to go completely insane."

    I don't know. I mean, when you see a high speed spinning metal fan, and you say "I wonder what would happen if I stick my dick in there?" I think we all can predict what would happen...

    Tying your marketing to a live and very contentious political issue is a dangerous, and probably bad, idea even if you sell primarily to a very narrow demographic who mostly all have the same politics; it's pretty much an insane idea when you sell (or used to...) to the totality of America.

    I mean, do you think it's a good idea if Coca Cola decide to come out as the "Official Drink of Blue Lives Matter"? If Burger King decide to switch their slogan from "Have it your way" to "You have the right to choose"?

    Regardless of your feelings on Blue and Black Lives Matter/abortion, anyone with an ounce of grey matter can see, the moment they hear of these plan, that they are utterly insane and whoever proposed them needs to be fired immediately and all records that they were ever associated with the company need to be destroyed!

  22. pjcamp1905

    It isn't just the MAGA right. AB-InBev had exactly the wrong response to the MAGA right and managed to piss off the left as well.

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