Bud Light's Problem Is That It Folded

Imagine this scenario: A popular consumer brand decides to use its standing to express solidarity with a group of people who are the victims of hate and persecution. It knows this action will receive a backlash from bigots and trolls, and it also knows some of those bigots and trolls just happen to be its own customers.

Everyone huddles and weighs the pros and the cons. “Do we or don’t we?” Despite most of marketing being radically risk-averse, the brand decides to move forward with the bold but necessary idea. The team activates the campaign, takes the initial blow, and refuses to back down. The bigots and trolls do their thing, and sales go down.

But for every existing customer who's mad, two new ones get animated. Then sales go up. The brand begins to understand that hateful customers, regardless of the size of their platform, create material long-term reputational risk that's just been baked into the sales baseline from the previous periods all along. The campaign succeeds because, not only does it activate new customers, it also transfers brand poison—that reputational risk—from its brand to a competitor.

This scenario is not what happened with Bud Light, the latest brand to get slapped down by the MAGA hat-wearing crowd for, in their words, "being woke." But it could have been.

In case you missed it, trans actor and influencer Dylan Mulvaney received from the brand a can of beer with her picture on it, and participated in a social media promotion. While this basic influencer marketing activity falls epically short of being a partnership or a campaign on its own, anti-trans bigots got mad about it online anyway. 

Bud Light’s mistake wasn’t that it included Mulvaney in this marketing campaign. The mistake was that it folded like wet newspaper the moment critics predictably got together to fling red, transphobic meat at the Anheuser-Busch brewery until some stuck. 

Here’s a fact that, for whatever reasons, the brass at Bud Light still doesn’t get: Toxic customers cost brands real money. If a person wants to loudly “debate” strangers about which races, ethnicities, and gender identities deserve to live, and that person is holding a Bud Light in their hand while they’re doing that, then that is bad for the brand, even though it has ostensibly just sold one unit of product to a customer.

And when a brand plays footsie with fans who loudly express bigoted views, as Bud Light is clearly doing, that amounts to signing off on those views. “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” said Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth in an April 14 statement. Exactly what “discussion” does Whitworth think is going on when bigots talk about Mulvaney? Changing the reporting structure of its marketing department will help Bud Light “maintain focus on the things we do best: brewing great beer for all consumers,” it said (emphasis mine) in a different statement. How all-lives-matter of them.

Instead of these tone-deaf responses, Bud Light should be standing firm and not backing down. Losing toxic customers is a winning business strategy because those customers will carry their toxic reputations into a competitor’s house. Bud Light needs to force the bigots to go elsewhere so they’ll be some other beer brand’s problem. 

In capitulating to the MAGA crowd, Bud Light tells us more about its values and beliefs than any carefully casted and meticulously focus-grouped ad campaign touting an alleged commitment to diversity and inclusivity could. In disavowing its relationship with Mulvaney—and there was no real relationship to speak of; Bud Light just sent her beer with her photo on it—Bud Light flushed hundreds of millions of marketing dollars down the frat house toilet where its beer usually ends up after it’s metabolized.

The brand’s decision to side with the bigots has annihilated its standing among everyone else, and the company’s evident lack of awareness about this is astonishing. 

The light beer category is—and I’ll be charitable here—image-driven. For the most part, light beer is light beer, and brand-loyal light beer consumers get locked in to their brand of choice not because of how it tastes, but because of the experience they have with beer and therefore the image they can project by drinking a particular brand. 

This means light beer brands can’t thrive by selling to an aging customer base. A 25-year-old brand-loyal customer is far, far more valuable than a 55-year-old one. There’s ample evidence that Gen Z consumers, the oldest of whom are now of legal drinking age, will only patronize brands they believe care about the world around them. More broadly, many existing Bud Light customers do want the brand to care about equity and inclusivity—or, as the cultural reactionary extremists among its base would say it, to “be woke.” 

One lesson we can learn here is that influencer marketing is really a PR function, not a marketing one. If marketing is the voice of the customer, then PR is the soul of the company. It is the only discipline whose job is to understand what every stakeholder wants and why. Doing influencer marketing to Mulvaney in the way Bud Light did it was lazy woke-washing, and I doubt that a PR team would've done so because our industry talks all the time about why those kinds of empty gestures don't work. PR pros know better.

Still, lazy woke-washing is sometimes at least an attempt at doing the right thing. Instead of using the hate-ridden backlash as evidence that its allyship is necessary, and that is uniquely positioned to make a difference, Bud Light stuck a finger in the eye of everyone who values progress. It told customers that its ad campaigns don’t mean shit. This should alarm every stakeholder.

Another lesson we can learn is that political polarization and brand marketing do have a tight relationship right now, and it’s not the one that brands that just want to be left alone to sell beer would like it to be. 

The bigots and trolls who are making the most noise about Bud Light are political freeloaders, in that they use wedge issues developed by partisan political operatives—in this case, hate (both performative and real) targeting trans people—to obtain power and influence. Just like any other political actor, when these freeloaders hit on an issue that delivers them the political capital with their base they’re so thirsty for, they’re going to squeeze the most capital they possibly can out of that issue. 

This is why Bud Light’s sales won’t rebound among its base, even after it threw Mulvaney and every other trans person under an 18-wheeler stacked to the rafters with beer kegs. Bigots will continue to lambast the brand because, at the end of the day, it’s not about gender identity, and it’s sure as hell not about beer. It’s about power.

The brand will throw a ton of money at this problem as it sinks into cultural irrelevance along with the rest of the MAGA base. Given its cowardly response to the Mulvaney faux-controversy, that’s where it belongs.