Bud Light will need to pivot its marketing strategy and stay true to its longtime messaging campaign if it wants to recapture some of its customer base, according to a brand strategist.
In recent weeks, Bud Light has seen its sales plummet after it embarked on a promotional campaign with transgender TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney in early April, sparking a boycott against the company. Industry data shows that there are no signs that the boycott will be ending anytime soon, with Bud Light’s sales again dropping 26.8 percent year-over-year for the week ending June 10.
What Bud Light should do, is “poke fun at” itself and say it was “wrong,” he said. “Everyone loves somebody that’s self-depreciating.”
After the backlash erupted around its decision to produce a beer can with Mulvaney’s face on it, Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch executives have attempted to pivot away from the controversy. Last month, in a call with analysts, Anheuser-Busch CEO Michel Doukeris said that “one can” was produced with Mulvaney’s face, and that the company would be tripling its investment into Bud Light.
“People often talk about this topic in social media like noise,” Doukeris told the Financial Times in a later interview, blaming the backlash on social media-driven “misinformation” and “confusion.” “You have one fact, and every person puts an opinion behind the fact. And then the opinions start to be replicated fast on each and every comment. By the time that 10 or 20 people put a comment out there, the reality is no longer what the fact is, but is more [about] what the comments were.”
Lost No. 1 Spot
For the month of May, Bud Light lost its No. 1 spot to Constellation Brands-owned Modelo Especial in the United States, according to Bump Williams industry data. “It’s not looking pretty,” Stienstra noted in the interview. “They’ve lost their number one positioning.”“Summer weeks and weekends are the glory periods of beer,” Stienstra continued. “This could not have come at a worse time to be happening in April, and now we’re in June and it’s not letting up.”
Bump Williams, the head of the eponymous consulting firm, told the New York Post Wednesday that Bud Light is still the No. 1 brand in the country for the year, adding it’s “unlikely” Modelo will become America’s top-selling beer on a 52-week basis. “In some instances, the trends for a particular brand may be healthy in some local areas across the country and worse in others,” Williams stated.
“This was a tough week for Bud Light and other beer brands” that are owned by Anheuser-Busch. His firm noted that sales of Budweiser were down 10 percent, Natural Light was down 2.3 percent, and Michelob Ultra was down 2.4 percent. Notably, Budweiser’s sales were down 7.8 percent the previous week, the data show.
Several days ago, an executive with Bud Light maker Anheuser-Busch spoke out about the boycott as he received an award during the Cannes Lions International Festival in the south of France.
“It’s tough to see the controversial and divisive debates that have been happening in the U.S. in the last couple of weeks involving lots of brands and companies, including and especially Bud Light,” Anheuser-Busch’s global chief marketing officer, Marcel Marcondes, told the Cannes Lions International Festival, according to AdAge. “It’s tough exactly because what we do is all about bringing people together.”
As he received the “Creative Marketer of the Year” at the Cannes festival, Marcondes said the backlash was a “wake-up call” for marketers like himself to be “very humble” amid controversy and during “times like this.”
“That’s what we’re doing, being very humble, and really reminding ourselves of what we should do best every day, which is to really understand our consumers. Which is to really celebrate and appreciate every consumer that loves our brands—but in a way that can make them be together, not apart,” Marcondes told a crowd at the festival.
