Lessons we can learn from the Bud Light marketing debacle

Much like the engineer who gets complacent about gravity there are certain immutable laws in marketing that will punish you if ignored. Last year the American beer brand Bud Light attempted to ignore the marketing equivalent of gravity and was severely punished.

The mainstream narrative continues to be that it is all a matter of ‘anti-trans’ bigotry, and whilst that may account for some of the backlash, there is a consistent trend now of corporations drawing upon identity politics to blame consumers for their own creative laziness, complacency and hubris.

With just a tiny bit of effort things may have gone very differently.

A key law of marketing is to increase your market share by adding to your consumer base, not play high stakes poker by trying to replace your core demographic with a new, and hopefully bigger one.? Bud Light’s marketing people thought they knew better.

Bud Light's vice president of marketing at the time was Alissa Heinerscheid - who only became a vice president in July 2022. She stated that her goal was to evolve the Bud Light advertising to make it more inclusive, moving away from the increasingly dated humour associated with it.

In a March 23, 2023, interview for Make Yourself at Home Heinerscheid stated:

“...?this brand is in decline. It has 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?... It's like, we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. And my?... what I brought to that was a belief in, okay, 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.”

Let’s put aside the immorality of marketing alcohol to young people for a moment and consider the very many ways she might have achieved this goal.

At this point most marketing professionals would have agreed with her central premise. The brand was in decline and needed to broaden its consumer base. Perhaps some advertising that spoke to the idea of bringing new people into the fold could have been pursued. I could easily imagine an advertisement where some of the traditional demographic are drinking the product at a sporting event when one of them notices another group of the hoped for new demographic also drinking the product. He ponders this for a moment then raises his can towards them and gives them a little ‘cheers’. They smile and give him one back. Both groups revert their focus to the unfolding sporting activities. It is low key but it says ‘I am doing my thing, you are doing yours, but it is cool we both have this thing in common’.

I spent 37 seconds thinking of that and there is no way on earth it could have been anywhere near as catastrophic as what they actually went with.

On April 1st 2023 social media performance artist Dylan Mulvaney uploaded a video to Instagram dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In the video Mulvaney states, "so, I kept hearing about this thing called March Madness, and I thought we were all just having a hectic month! But it turns out it has something to do with sports. And I'm not sure exactly which sport, but either way it's a cause to celebrate." Mulvaney’s likeness appeared on Bud Light cans in the video.

In Australia we have a saying – ‘taking the piss’. This means you don’t show something the required respect and have a kind of superior ironic attitude. Mulvaney’s words were ‘taking the piss’, clearly articulating a complete lack of interest in the sport that is so important to the core demographic and their beverage of choice. To me it came across as massively disrespectful and essentially said ‘I don’t care about what is important to you but I am being paid lots of money to promote it anyway and it is all a bit of a laugh’.

Not the right message to send to a demographic largely made up of working men who enjoy having a beer and watching sport after a tough week.

It may possibly have gone a bit differently if Mulvaney had been humble and respectful of the sport and beverage combination, but a more central problem was the choice of Mulvaney in the first place. A brand ambassador needs to be someone who has solidity – a proven record of achievement in some particular area that can somehow be aligned with the product. If you are selling a sporting brand then a champion sportsperson for example.

Mulvaney on the other hand was a shooting star that had garnered huge attention on digital platforms most notably by identifying as a ‘girl’ and toying with transgressive identities and imagery that at times teetered on the brink of what some found disturbingly close to the pedophilic. In recent times I have seen a picture of Mulvaney sporting a beard and a cowboy hat reinforcing the notion that this is an individual that changes identities whenever it suits and will do almost anything to generate digital attention.

Using Australian terminology once more Mulvaney is a ‘rat bag’ and a ‘character’, and someone that the English might characterize as an ‘eccentric’. As such I am somewhat endeared but is this someone you would trust the fate of your brand to? Someone who will change their entire persona on a whim? No.

The worst thing was just how incredibly creatively lazy the whole thing was. A shocking example of what has become something of a norm for corporate entities where they spend almost no time on any kind of creative effort, half heartedly tick the ‘DEI’/’current thing’ box, then scream ‘bigotry’ when their customer base pushes back and doesn’t swamp them with increased profits.

There are so many things about it that I don’t understand. Surely if you are revamping a brand identity you have some kind of plan that would involve retaining the support of as much as possible of your core demographic, whilst introducing new themes and associations. You would surely spend just a little time doing market research and you would create an advertising campaign that was mindful of the factors that made your brand popular in the first place, adopting the standpoint of your core demographic and matching your new aspirations against their general expectations. You would choose a brand ambassador that had a proven record in whatever area you sought to appeal to.

Bud Light did the exact opposite of all of this with something that really seemed like an ill conceived whim, rather than a marketing campaign. How it got approved is beyond me. And even more incredibly it is no longer an exception but seemingly almost normal operating procedures for many major brands – be creatively lazy then blame ‘bigotry’ when it doesn’t work.

Next time I will look at a brand that in my view is negotiating the complex terrain of identity politics with aplomb and managing to be inclusive of everyone in their marketing.