Bud Light, and Budweiser products generally, used to be the drink of normal, red-blooded Americans who just wanted to get the grill going and have a good time with friends. Not anymore. Now the beer has decided to go fully woke and attack its “fratty” past.
Such is what the Vice President of Marketing who is responsible for the change in Bud Light’s campaign, Alissa Heinerscheid, said. She took over the position of leading Bud Light in 2022, where she sought to make it more inclusive, claiming the brand was in “decline” and needed to expand its customer base to a more diverse segment. Discussing Bud Light’s turn to wokeness, she said:
“I‘m a businesswoman. I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light and it was, this brand is in decline. It’s been in decline for a really long time. And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light. So I had this super clear mandate, like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand and my what I brought to that was a belief in okay, what is what are we what does evolve and elevate mean?
“It means inclusivity it means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different and appeals to women and to men and representation is it sort of the heart of evolution, you got to see people who reflect you in the work and we have a hangover. I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of Friday. Kind of out of touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
Well, that didn’t sit well with average Americans…the ones who drink Bud Light and Budweiser. So sales of it fell off of a cliff, as the Daily Wire reported, saying:
“I think society flexes its muscles sometimes and reminds manufacturers that the consumer is still in charge,” Jeff Fitter, owner of Case & Bucks, a restaurant and sports bar in Barnhart, Missouri, told Fox Business. “In Bud Light’s effort to be inclusive, they excluded almost everybody else, including their traditional audience.”
Therein lies the irony. Beer has long been a more macho drink. Women can, of course, drink it, but beer has been associated with men standing around, talking sports and punching each other. Now, before you move to cancel me, that’s just how it has been. I didn’t make it happen. Women have a nice glass of pinot grigio, men hork down a Bud, which happens to be the nation’s top-selling beer brand.
But hoo boy, did men bail on Bud Light. Fitter said sales of Anheuser-Busch bottled products dropped 30% over the past week, while draft beer plunged 50%.
Continuing and reporting on other examples of Bud Light’s utter collapse, the Daily Wire also said:
It wasn’t just Case & Bucks that saw sales of Bud plummet. Brewhouse owner Alex Kesaris told Fox that 80% of Bud Light drinkers ordered something else this week, “while the 20% who did order the beer ‘weren’t on social media and hadn’t heard yet.’”
A national beer-industry analyst told Fox Business that Bud Light’s move was a “bad decision” that defied “virtually every rule in building brands and marketing.”
The analyst cited a scenario in Texas, where Bud Light has long sponsored a weekly dart league that draws more than 100 players every Thursday. The bar usually blows through three kegs of Bud Light at the event — nearly 500 12-ounce glasses.
Will Bud Light rethink its strategy? We’ll see, but if these number keep up it’s hard to imagine it not running full speed in the opposite direction.
"*" indicates required fields