Bud Light has faced every consumer-facing brand’s worst nightmare since the disastrous marketing stunt with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in early April. The powerful boycott against the company has cost the beermaker roughly $20 billion in market value, and sales have continually plummeted. Bud Light is now on its last resort, trying to win back customers with rebates, pandering commercials, and more.
The American Tribune reported that Bud Light is cheaper than water in some retail locations. Invoking the classic supply and demand curve, it would appear the boycott is so aggressive that retailers are doing anything to get the unsold inventory off their shelves, such as slashing prices drastically. According to Andy Wagner, Glen Miller’s Beer & Soda Warehouse manager, “At this point, it’s cheaper than some of the cases of water we’re selling in the back. It’s just not moving like it used to.”
Some have tried to defend Dylan Mulvaney and suggest the decline in Bud Light sales is not the transgender influencer’s fault. However, this is unlikely because other beer companies have gained market share and increased sales since Bud Light’s woke advertising failure. Furthermore, Wagner pointed out that cases of Miller Lite were selling for $24.99 while cases of Bud Light are sitting on shelves at $8.99
The assertion that Bud Light’s decline is due to decreased demand for beer among American consumers is dubious at best and cannot account for the plummeting sales figures. For example, the latest sales data shows a decline of nearly 30 percent year-over-year. Furthermore, we would also expect declining sales data for other competing beers. However, Bud Light’s competition is gaining market share and seeing sales increases, refuting this claim.
According to a report earlier this year from the American Tribune, other beer companies have increased their share of market value by roughly $3.2 billion, with Molson Coors taking $2.2 billion of that alone. Moreover, Bud Light lost its coveted status as the top-selling beer in America to Model Especial as the boycott has taken its course on the woke beer company.
The manager of the beer warehouse noted that Bud Light sales have plummeted nearly 45 percent at his store when compared to a year ago. “I’ve seen longtime Bud Light customers trying other beers. If they find something they like, they may not come back,” he said. “It’s not that they stopped drinking beer. They just stopped buying Bud Light.”
Last week Mulvaney slammed Bud Light for not showing enough support to the transgender social media personality amid the boycott, showing how Bud Light is receiving backlash from both sides of the aisle for the stance the company took on a contentious social issue in the culture war.
Mulvaney said, “I was waiting for the brand to reach out to me, but they never did. For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse in my opinion than not hiring a trans person at all, because it gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want.”
As we time and time again, “Go woke, go broke.”
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