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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Yeah, this is one of those cases of not knowing your own market. While what they did was laudable in a general sense, they should have also realized their core demographic is heavily conservative and that such a move was highly likely to hurt them far more than it would benefit them.
Bud in general and Bud Light in particular is just the worst kind of swill. It's only redeeming quality is being cheap.
How was it laudable? They caved to the bigots nearly immediately and fired the folks responsible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/business/bud-light-dylan-mulvaney.html
I meant the original move, not the immediate backtracking. They started from a laudable position by at least attempting to be somewhat inclusive, then of course immediately fucked it up once their quarterly profits looked like they might take a hit.
Fair enough - it's a personal pet peeve of mine that the backtracking rarely gets mentioned (as backtracking) in coverage of the event.
Target didn't do much better, IMO.
That's really overselling what it was. They made ONE can with the special print, the also made a number of other special cans for other influencers that weren't "woke". This was supposed to be a quiet nod to the LGBTQ+ community, which also drinks a reasonable amount of bud light, just like the rainbow tap handle my local gay bar has for it on tap.
How or why the right-wing outrage machine landed on this as the outrage du jour, who knows? But they and most major brands do stuff like this all the time, they just got really unlucky.
Also worth noting, beer sales in general, and especially big brand light lagers have been declining. Attributing all of Bud Lights decline to this one instance ignores a lot of other trends.
Yeah I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if this was calculated to coincide with the decline. It’s a nice easy win to call for a boycott of something of declining popularity.
I think they just didn't appreciate our current media environment well enough. They thought they could try to expand sales to new customers with a TikTok ad campaign that their core consumers would never see. What they didn't plan for was the fact that right-wing "news" has become pure Christian nationalist grievance propaganda that scours social media for anything they can use to outrage their audience; they didn't expect that their little TikTok ad campaign would become the biggest story in the right-wing outrage ecosystem for weeks.
If they didn't expect that their head has been in the same for eons. I think this is the leadership of the company making decisions based on their environment and what investors wanted. They knew it would piss off the right. They assumed the right was irrelevant.
Which might be true in like 40 years, but for now the kids they're appealing to aren't drinking beer. Hell. The way trends are going they never will. Alcohol to my knowledge isn't nearly as popular as it was, and people see it for what it is among the younger generations.
No amount of rainbows and trans influencers will convince people to start drinking poison. But your average idiot with no sense of the consequences of their actions?
Guess who they tend to vote for.
If you look there’s plenty of cheap beers that taste at least a little better. When I was in college in the 00s I’d drink Lion’s Head for like $10 a case.
Plus they had little puzzles under the caps so it’s got more value.
Hmm fair enough. Its only redeeming quality then is being cheap and well known. Really there's no good reason to drink Bud, even before they pulled this stunt they were crap.
The cheap Bud Light analogue is Natural Light.