Posted on 04/13/2023 5:20:53 PM PDT by 11th_VA
A “lotta” good old boys drank Budweiser. Please note that the word “drank” is past tense.
“Here I think AB stepped in it. Really, there are just too many great beers out there.”
My local Micro Brewery makes as good of a beer as I drank in England years ago when I lived there. Their IPAs are outstanding.
If one is every in Salado, Texas a stop at Barrow’s Brewery is worth the time. It is owned and run by a retired Master Sergent.
“Oh bullcrap, they expected the backlash. They are betting on this blowing over and being forgotten, just like the NFL, NASCAR, and all pro-sports wokeness campaigns. Their message gets across, there is some light boycotting and boo-hoo hooing by conservatives, and then 2 weeks later back to spending money on those products. Conservatives are horrible at boycotts and the left knows it.”
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I don’t know about that. You can mess with a lot of things, but once you go after a guy’s garage fridge full of beer, things start to get serious. If there is Bud Light in that fridge, every time he opens that door he is going to see Mulvaney’s face. His friends that come over to hang out will mock him (or at least he is afraid they will), so he makes sure he has a different brand in there for the Friday night BBQ, poker. or darts game. And, once you switch beers you need a strong reason to switch back.
It has been a over a week and this story is still making front page news. Usually brand damages blow over faster than this or the company apologies and works to undo the harm to its brand. Think back on the Coke damage with the new recipe and branding. They had to fix things with Coke Classic and basically apologize for screwing up.
Upper management is already distancing themselves from the decision to feature Mulvaney as an “influencer” and saying they weren’t aware of the campaign. That’s a big step from their original response.
As a beer industry consultant said, it’s not as if AB is going to make up that lost six billion in market share by beer drinkers suddenly consuming twice as much Bud Light this weekend. That money is gone. AB is going to have to do something to stop the bleed. Some Bud Light drinkers are just now finding out about the marketing catastrophe and their favorite beer brand going “woke”. Some will not learn of it until tomorrow when they mention to a co-worker they plan on stopping to get beer on the way home on Friday.
I’ve heard no stories of bars or package stores saying that there was a drop in sales for a few days and then sales of Bud Light went back to normal. All stories continue to be that the beer is not selling and stores are not re-stocking as usual.
We shall see. If it is still a story come Monday, AB will be in serious trouble.
Grind the Clydesdales into hamburger and glue. Let’s see if mulvaney is the glue that can bind those two together
(Get Woke Go Broke.)
Let’s hope so
“According to sources cited by the Daily Wire, ‘no one at a senior level’ was aware of the Mulvaney brand partnership before it launched, and the campaign was undertaken by a ‘low-level marketing staffer.’”
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Oh please! She is on video talking about how much she disdains the usual Bud Light branding and wanting to bring in a more “diverse” customer base (I’m paraphrasing here). She also brags about being such a high level company VP hired in the fall of 2022. This was no “low-level” marketing staffer.
AB screwed up. She did to the company exactly what they hired her to do. She was the D.I.E. marketing VP and she did what D.I.E. administrators do.
Better not be a hot air popper.
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Nope. A deep cast iron skillet (with lid) for stove top popping. A gift at our wedding shower from 1976.
Acceptable depending the fat used. :)
“Acceptable depending the fat used. :)”
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I have lard, olive oil, or coconut oil and I’m not cooking popcorn in olive or coconut oil. So lard it is.
AB screwed up. They need to fire the marketing VP, admit their screw up by not being in control of their company and it’s marketing decisions, and send mega monies to either a charity of Kid Rock’s choice, or the Christian school in Tennessee who lost six of their loved ones to a person such as Melvaney. Or both!
And the group that WOULD punish them are all old, not their target market, and will all be dead within a couple decades. People under 50 won’t care in sufficient numbers.
That is what panther pee will do to you, and bud like is cat pee.
It is very easy to attach an emotion to beer.
Marketing does it all the time. They create viral images, catch phrases, and songs that latch themselves onto their product.
They don’t want negative associations.
For example.
In the 1990’s a Coors beer, Zima, was marketed to men but developed a feminine reputation; men started avoiding it. Zima became a joke used for mockery more than consumption.
Alcohol has a bandwagon affect; people will chose a beverage because it is popular, they will avoid it if it becomes a joke.
Bud just made itself a joke.
It will be replayed again and again in every bar.
“They’ve lost $6.7 billion so far and that number continues to climb.”
BUD stock gained $2 billion today.
Those types of stock movements are nothing to get excited. You can find that level of variation several times a month in most stocks - nothing to get excited over.
BUD market valuation is $133 billion today. A month ago it was 5% lower or about $126 billion.
So even with this PR disaster they’re ahead of where they were a month ago.
The company was caught by surprise? Any executive working there who was surprised at the reaction is incompetent. About the most important thing management of any company needs to understand is who their customers are. That’s Management 101.
Now they’re paralyzed with fear. They don’t want to do anything that might make things worse so they’re watching the company burn down.
The solution is easy. End their relationship with this freak, apologize profusely to their former customers, and hope that some are able to forgive them and begin buying their product again. Of course they may end up losing the trans-market, which probably accounts for .001% of their customer base, but at least they may be able to win back some goodwill from the remaining 99.999%
Management bonuses have odd metrics in them. The reason they did the enire trans promoter was most likely due to a bonus metric. Same with diversity. DIE, queers and women folks in higher positions. Making Monet want the only way to get the green. Guaranteed!
Maybe not at the corporate level but lots of small breweries out there. I’ll put a yes vote for the Russian River brewery. Tasty stuff!
Sounds great! This is what will hurt AB, lots of options at the local level.
It will ultimately depend on shelf space. If Bud loses facings in major grocery chains, that space is not easy to win back. Count the facings of Bud Light in your local Walmart and at the big grocery chains in your area. In six months count again. Shelf space is roughly proportional to sales in mature product categories. If a brand’s shelf space is reduced by 50% the store’s investment in that brand’s inventory drops by 50%. Inventory investment reflects the sales volume of the brand.
Let’s see what the trend is over the next month and then six months.
Just my own spot observations yesterday at my local mainly beer drinkers watering hole
Everybody was joking and laughing about this...
...as the guys were slamming their bottles of Bud and the women sipping their Bud Lite
The life long Bud drinkers here aren’t going to switch brands over this
I lost my taste for beer several years ago, but if Captain Morgan goes and puts on a dress, I’m gonna become a teetotaler
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