- This topic has 16 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 9 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
Unclear at this point. They lost between $4 and $7 billion in market cap, depending on who you believe. Checked with the always-reliable Snopes who reminds us for the 8 millionth time that correlation does not imply causation.
And the marketer in charge has taken leave:
Bud Light exec takes leave after boycott calls, reports say | AP News
-
This will be chalked up to a bunch of troglodytes being “anti trans” but the reality is mulvaney is a good example of a scary phenomenon: really demented, deviant people getting a lot of publicity for “being” a certain identity, but in reality exploiting that identity by just being bad/weird/controversial.
Mulvaney acts like a little girl. If she were not trans he would be just really weird. Because she is trans it comes off as abhorrent to a lot of people. Literally she is a grown male acting like a 9 year old girl.
How the marketers think it’s a good idea to attach to such mental illness is beyond me. I have a core belief that the internet rewards bad. The badder you are the more clicks you get because you will arouse intense reaction. Mulvaney is just bad.
So, you are a woman now. Go ahead, take the W but don’t press into the realm of creepy craziness and expect no hatred. That’s not anti trans, it’s defense of actual healthy norms and culture.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work) -
-
Anheuser-Busch is no stranger to being on the wrong side of social issues.
Remember Carson King? On a fluke, he raised over $1M for a children’s hospital in 2019. Busch was offering to match the fundraising and even place Carson’s picture on Busch Light cans.
Everything was good until a reporter found some racist tweets by Carson from 2011. Busch pulled the plug on the deal, with a good deal of backlash for doing so.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/22/us/carson-king-busch-beer-venmo-trnd/index.html
-
Anheuser-Busch is no stranger to being on the wrong side of social issues. Remember Carson King? On a fluke, he raised over $1M for a children’s hospital in 2019. Busch was offering to match the fundraising and even place Carson’s picture on Busch Light cans. Everything was good until a reporter found some racist tweets by Carson from 2011. Busch pulled the plug on the deal, with a good deal of backlash for doing so. https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/22/us/carson-king-busch-beer-venmo-trnd/index.html
I remember that. I also remember that Aaron Calvin, the reporter who uncovered King’s ancient racist tweets (which King had done as a 16 year old) was himself exposed and fired from the Des Moines Register for his own offensive tweets:
Iowa reporter who exposed racist tweets fired for own tweets – BBC News
Seems Calvin’s own statements that mocked same-sex marriage, domestic abuse and included a racial slur. Cancel not, lest ye be canceled…
-
-
And now Maybelline is facing a boycott for throwing in with Dylan Mulvaney.
Maybelline faces boycott for partnership with Dylan Mulvaney
-
Several weeks after the Bud Light trans marketing debacle, Bud Light sales are down 30%. Who could have ever predicted that?
Bud Light Sales Down Nearly 30% In Latest Data – OutKick
Going Woke Means Going Broke TM
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
-
Two months later, Budweiser (and Target and Kohl’s) are suffering from their trans marketing campaign. Bud Light’s marketing executive Alissa Heinerscheid trashed the brand for being “fratty” and “out of touch” with consumers.
Interesting choice of terms. I realize that Heinerscheid is using “fratty” as a pejorative. She was Groton/Harvard/Wharton — in other words, perhaps not perfectly positioned to run the marketing for a beer made in the midwest and purchased by people in flyover states. To better understand Bud Light consumers, it is important to note that they often live in places like Tennessee and Oklahoma and that they may purchase Bud Light out of a desire to save a little money. They often have jobs like mail carrier, Amazon driver and high school football coach.
Heinerscheid described Bud Light as a brand “in decline” and one that needed to “evolve” and “elevate” as a way of offsetting its decline.
Possible Lessons: Hiring people to do marketing for a product who have so little in common with the customers of that product is a pitfall that companies will want to avoid.
Here’s some photos of Heinerscheid engaging in fratty behavior at Harvard, drinking Rolling Rock (Eastern version of Bud) and blowing into condoms.
According to a Gallup poll, 7.4% of our society is LGBTQ, and more than half of those identify as bisexual. 1.64 million people, according to the survey, are transgender. That’s a big number. A bigger number are the number of students currently in a fraternity or sorority (about 800k), or who are alumni of the Greek system (over 9 million) that dates back two centuries.
Fraternity men make up 85 percent of U.S. Supreme Court justices since 1910, 63 percent of all U.S. presidential cabinet members since 1900, and, historically, 76 percent of U.S. Senators, 85 percent of Fortune 500 executives,and 71 percent of the men in “Who’s Who in America.” And that’s not counting the 18 ex-frat U.S. presidents since 1877 (that’s 69 percent) and the 120 Forbes 500 CEOs (24 percent) from the 2003 list, including 10—or one-third—of the top 30. In the 113th Congress alone, 38 of the hundred Senate members come from fraternity (and, now, sorority) backgrounds, as does a full quarter of the House.
Anyway…the boycott is alive and well. Doesn’t surprise me. It’s a mediocre beer. There are two minor surprises: (1) Modelo Especiale is now the #1 seller in the USA, surpassing BL, and (2) AB actually owns Modelo everywhere except the United States.
Bud Light Boycott Shows No Signs Of Stopping After Two Months, Sales Data Shows | The Daily Caller
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
Modelo being number one was a big surprise to me when I saw it this weekend. I will confess that as a fairly steady beer drinker when I’m not trying to diet, Modelo especial wins on taste. I started drinking modelo occasionally a few years back and actually enjoy it. I mainly stock Miller lite as my go to water beer, but Modelo is on my go to list.
Mick you nailed it with the comment on hiring. It’s amazing to me how an ivy degree is somehow seen as a signal for wisdom. Heinerschneid’s interview, given just before the blow up, really sounds and looks out of touch. When you sell average piss beer behind a brand that was built on guy comedy and “dilly dilly,” you don’t go try to steer that ship toward things that make your core consumer uneasy. I would bet a lot of people buy Bud Light BECAUSE it’s fratty and connected to silly dude behavior.
I think I wrote this earlier in this thread, but I don’t think the bulk of the protest is about LGB issues. It’s about Dylan M. The person has and promotes behaviors that most mainstream adults would find abhorrent if they were in their own homes. SHe’s 30 and prances around acting like a little girl, which, even if she were female, would be weird. That she is a Male doing this and promoting it broadly is scary to far more people than is polite to admit.
Bud Light was tacked to a character that was a lightning rod already, and is paying for it. It could actually kill the brand. That’s just crazy to contemplate.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)
-
-
Now we have an answer. Bud Light revenue was down 10.5%, and EBITDA dropped 28.2%.
The company has responded by “leaning into the themes of football and country music.” Quelle surprise.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ab-inbev-bud-q2-earnings-report-2023-90a57dee
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
-
Interesting that overall A-B did ok financially. One wonders if their other brands benefited from the Bud Lite boycott.
I believe so, given that AB owns Modelo, which is the new number one. They own Modelo everywhere except the United States.
They did fall short of Q2’23 estimates of $15.33 billion, generating $15.12 billion. So, $210 million shy of estimate Q1’23 revenue was $14.21 billion, a 7.9% increase over the Q1’22 revenue. Also, their profits of $0.72/share beat analyst estimates of $0.68/share, so there’s that.
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
Second shoe dropped today: AB is selling off eight of their brands to a cannabis company, Tilray Brands.
The departing eight are:
- Shock Top
- Blue Point
- Redhook
- Breckenridge
- HiBall Energy
- Square Mile Cider
- Widmer Brothers Brewing
- 10 Barrel Brewing
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
Target is also sharply down, and expects sales to sharply decline further in Q3, 2023:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/target-tgt-q2-earnings-report-2023-cc9acf81
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
U. S. Sales of Bud Light were down a full 29% at the end of October. 13% down overall. In that business, that’s a huge number.
https://youtube.com/shorts/QWtP5_Z45m0?si=IitW1ndQntnZEZ9A
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
Bud light has dropped from 10.2% (#1 position) to 6.5% (#3 position).
https://www.wsj.com/business/bud-light-slips-to-no-3-after-boycott-reshaped-beer-industry-e4e9a102
I’d say that was a miscalculation…
Marketing’s a funny business. It’s like real estate or parenting…everyone thinks they can do it, and it’s really easy to do…badly. It’s very difficult to do well. So some 20 something woke ideologue decides to insert the political opposite of the demographic profile as the marketing focal point…yeah, that doesn’t work.
Last week, I caught up with a friend of mine who ran the sales and marketing for a very successful accounting firm years ago, sustaining a 40% annual growth rate for eight years when 5% was the industry norm. He left the firm and five years later, he saw the CEO at an industry function, and they catch up. The CEO says “One question…when you were with us, we grew 40%. You left, and we’ve grown 5% every year since. Why?” My buddy started laughing, thinking the CEO was kidding.
He wasn’t. So my friend says, “Uh, well, Bob…the program I created brought 300 to 500 new leads and 60 to 150 new clients to the firm every year. When I left, the firm couldn’t sustain the program.” Pretty typical in just about any kind of business. Another friend of mine in the same role did battle with the new CEO, who fired her. She had sustained 12% growth rates for five years, and in the three years since, the firm’s growth fell to 4%, 2% and less than 1%. In all, she figured, it cost the firm a collective $75 million in new revenue to fire her. C’est la vie.
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.