Bud Light: one year on

On Monday it will be one year since influencer Dylan Mulvaney posted a video to Instagram promoting Bud Light, triggering a boycott against the beer brand that was fueled by transphobia and right-wing opportunism.

So, what have we learned since then?

Three marketing professors (Jura Liaukonyte, Anna Tuchman and Xinrong Zhu) try to answer that question in an article in the Harvard Business Review.

And rather than just speculate and bloviate, the authors actually went out and collected some data on Bud Light consumption in the US, using a representative 150,000 household panel from a market research company called Numerator.

What they found was by no means revelatory, but it does make for good corroboration.

Measuring sales and purchase incidences against data from 2021 and 2022, the authors found that between April and the end of June, Bud Light’s sales and purchase incidence were 28% lower than in previous years.

Initially, sales were hit harder in Republican-dominated counties. But the decline persisted for almost eight months, and over time, the Democratic counties closed the gap. The authors suggest that this is because retailers and distributors began taking Bud Light off their shelves everywhere in response to the news cycle, reducing physical availability.

From interviews with a selection of the panelists, the authors discovered that 60% of those who bought less Bud Light in 2023 said they did so because of the ‘brand’s values or image' — a finding which tallied with the fact that people who mostly drank beer at home (rather than in social situations) were less likely to boycott.

The authors’ advice for brand marketers wishing to avoid the fate of Bud Light is to understand the degree of political polarisation within their customer base, be frank about how substitutable their product is, and avoid doing anything that prolongs the news cycle (putting your marketing team on leave, for example).

We're still in two minds about whether the Bud Light story is a teachable moment for marketers, or whether the brand was just a victim of freak circumstances and malign actors. But if we had to add a lesson to the list, it would be that in polarised societies brands should be especially cognizant of the fact they're never talking to just one section of their audience. What many of these brand backlash stories (Bud Light, North Face) seem to have in common is that they begin with a small activation intended only for a subset of consumers, which is then taken to a different audience and used to push a narrative.

That’s not to say brands should only ever say or do things that appeal to everyone equally. That way blandness lies. Just don’t be naive about who’s going to see your ads.

Campaign of the Week /

BMW found a novel way to ensure that it was front of mind for people considering buying an electric vehicle — posting photos of its cars at charging stations on Google Maps.?

Serviceplan, Dubai, came up with the idea for the campaign, which was based on the insight that most people thinking about buying an electric vehicle will first search for local charging stations to find out whether it’s a practical purchase.

To harvest this attention, BMW posted photos of its EVs at over 300 charging stations across Dubai to the reviews section of Google Maps. So, every time people searched for their nearest charging station, there was a good chance that they’d see a picture of a BMW.

According to the agency, the iJack campaign only required three BMWs and a smartphone to make, and it earned $2.2m of media coverage and led to a 400% increase in test drives of electric vehicles for BMW. Read our full analysis, here. Contagious.

50 years of planning /

'At BMP we allowed JWT credit for inventing the name "Account Planning", but believed we had invented the real thing.’

Stephen King’s Planning Guide?turned 50 years old this month. By coincidence, that was the same year that author and former planning director Paul Feldwick started his career in advertising.

Feldwick worked at BMP with Stanley Pollitt who, along with JWT’s King, is widely credited with inventing advertising planning. So we asked Feldwick to write about what it was like at the birth of the practice, and how he thinks it may have changed for today’s strategists. Contagious.

How to fight the bias against creativity /

People tend to disagree more about the value of novel ideas than incremental innovations, and they also tend to view that disagreement as a reason to reject creativity.

At least, that was the conclusion of a research paper published in Nature earlier this year. We thought it was an interesting bit of work that provided some new insights into the already-known bias that people have against new ideas.

So, to find out more we spoke to one of the authors of the study, postdoctoral scholar Wayne Johnson.

He told us why the best definition of novelty is ‘distance from a reference point', how much of an effect disagreement has on people’s enthusiasm for new ideas, and what you can do to counter the latent mistrust of creativity. Contagious.

Machine Earning /

Whether you value artistry or efficiency, artificial intelligence is becoming a crucial tool for marketers.

We’ve put together a 50-minute briefing session on how to leverage AI, featuring an up-to-date review of how the technology is reshaping advertising, thought-provoking case studies, and expert perspectives from marketers and computer scientists.

Click the link to book your 'Machine Earning' briefing with a member of Contagious’ advisory team. Contagious.