Serious question..
All of the stories I see are saying Bud light sales down @15-30%.
With all this press and all of the negative coverage. How is it ONLY down 15-30%.
Who and Where are they still getting 70-85% of the bud light business from?
My guess would be distibutors and sports venues still contracted. But remember the boycott started right at the beginning of Q2. Wait until the news come out in early July, about sales in Q2. They will be devastating and it’ll be right in the middle of summer plus you got college/NFL football seasons coming up.
i don’t think the decline is 100% due to the Dylan Mulvany idiocy.
When the video from alissa heinerscheid, the VP for Bud Light surfaced with her complaining about the fratty out of touch humor of Bud Light, that was the anchor to really crush the sales.
The original Dylan Mulvany can was bad, but the follow on commments by Bud Light Executives only accelerated the decline.
huge group of the population who dont know and dont care
ignorance and apathy
“Who and Where are they still getting 70-85% of the bud light business from?”
a) lefties will still buy it
b) many stadiums and other venues have concession contracts with Budweiser, and so that’s the only thing you can buy if you go to a concert, sporting event, etc
“Who and Where are they still getting 70-85% of the bud light business from?”
Liberals who cannot afford craft beers.
The distributors, large retailers, and restaurant chains write their purchase orders months in advance and have to take delivery.
Many buyers will submit forecasts for a season, if not the full year, and the seller has a legal footing to hold them to it. It's not as concrete an agreement as a purchase order but it does have standing if the buyer bought materials to meet it and has no one else to redirect the quantities to. (and since Budweiser trashed their brand, there is no one else to redirect the quantities to)
The buyers will fight it out with the seller as to how much discount they'll get on the invoices. I'd be surprised if the initial guaranteed sell-through was lower than 95% which means the seller (InBev) will only give full credit for 5% of what the buyer ordered that didn't sell. The other 95% is all on the buyer. For example, if I buy 100,000 cases with a 95% guaranteed sell-through, and I only sell 80,000 of them, I pay for 95,000 (eating the loss on 15,000) and the seller credits me for 5,000. What's making this worse is that credits from the seller don't mean much if customers don't want their other products.
Weeks Of Supply then become the major issue. The buyer has to receive and pay for current orders but won't write future orders because instead of eight weeks of supply they've got 52+.
In this case, since the brand is tainted, most liquidators won't even pick it up at a greatly discounted price because even they can't unload it on a charity or foreign country. It's not worth shipping cold beer long distances (hence most beer is brewed and bottled locally).
The numbers are probably bogus. At my local bar, they never really sold a lot of bud light, since they have about 80 real beers on tap. I talked to the owner a couple of days ago he said that in in the past he had pretty consistently sold about 100 BL a month. Since this broke open, he's sold 4.
There’s lots of the beer is in the supply chain...not all of the stuff sitting in warehouses or being transported by trucks is subject to the boycott... yet.
What kind of person would want to be seen holding a beer that screamed ‘sexual weirdo/groomer’...
For a major corporation like Anheuser-Busch, that is a major, major disaster.
The numbers may not seem that impressive but having worked for large corporations most of my life in a management role, even flat sales will get all hands on deck to find out what is going on.
I've seen heads roll with 5% growth (when forecast was for 10%).
If this sales decline continues, they are going to have to do some major downsizing at breweries and with corporate staff. Unless this turns around quick, you are going to see thousands of people lose their jobs.
I feel sorry for those people as they had nothing to do with this epicly bad marketing decision.