Sales of Bud Light have continued to crash in the wake of the Dylan Mulvaney uproar, with the beer brand now having suffered through five straight weeks of crashing sales as people switch to other beers and leave Anheuser-Busch products expiring on their shelves.
The New York Post, reporting the recent sales data for both Bud Light and other Anheuser-Busch products, said:
Bud Light suffered its fifth straight week of worsening sales drops since the Dylan Mulvaney controversy began — stoking doubts about whether the mega-brand can recover as the crucial summer beer-drinking season begins.
Nationwide retail sales of Bud Light sales dropped 23.6% versus a year ago during the week ended May 6 — slightly worse than the 23.3% decline for the week ended April 29, according to data from Bump Williams Consulting and NielsenIQ data.
Sales of other Anheuser-Busch brands also continued to drop, albeit at a slower rate than the week before. Those included Budweiser, down 9.7% versus an 11.4% drop a week earlier; Michelob Ultra, down 2.9% versus 4.3%; and Natural Light, down 2.5% versus 5.2% the previous week.
Further, the NYP quotes Bump Williams, whose consulting firm was involved in collecting the data on Bud Light Sales, as saying, “This seems to be where the brand’s weekly declines have started to settle, falling in that -20% range over the past few weeks. I wonder if this going to be the ‘floor.’” Still, even if Bud Light settles at ~20% lower, that’s 20% of it’s $4.8 billion in 2022 sales, which would mean the company’s lost sales from the Dylan Mulvaney drama will be close to a billion dollars.
Williams added that he thinks that the “Bud Light drinker is waiting for a genuine and sincere apology from [Anheuser-Busch] and a crystal clear communication on exactly what happened and how important the Bud Light drinkers are to the [company].” However, he also noted that the company “is running out of time to fix the problem as the summer selling season unofficially started last weekend and memorial day is in two weeks.”
Bud Light reportedly plans on “investing heavily in sports marketing, and incorporating the US military and country and western music, farmers, law enforcement, and first responders into their advertising” to get out of the sales slump. We’ll see if the condescending to conservatives strategy pays off but, given how its country music-themed commercial went, that seems doubtful.
Further, the real problem is that the beer brand has become a joke, as Breitbart’s John Nolte pointed out, saying:
Sarcasm aside, the problem here is likely irreversible. Bud Light, which had been the top beer brand in the country, is now the CNN of beers. Like CNN, Bud Light is brand-damaged. It has become a joke, a punchline, and a way for normal people to bond, find, and then commiserate with one another over our cancerous culture.
Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing at Bud Light behind the Mulvaney campaign, took a leave of absence after footage of her criticizing the brand’s “fratty” image, and thus its customer base, circulated online.
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