In the not-too-distant future, communication classes at universities will be teaching about the colossal Bud Light branding mess that has been unfolding before our eyes over the past few weeks. We are witnessing what may very well be some of the most important lessons in corporate branding in the last decade. This has all the potential to be even bigger than New Coke. In fact, this may even reshape, not just our thinking about corporate branding, but also, our understanding of how branding may shape and influence political discourse and divisions.
Here’s why:
A brand is the emotional connection that a target audience forms toward a product, service, organization, or individual. Because it’s an emotional connection, it’s also, often, illogically powerful, and occasionally volatile. The brand connection between target audience and product can, in many ways, be compared to a high school romance: overly intense, incredibly fickle, and subject to huge swings over what normally would be considered minutia.
This is where we are with the Bud Light saga. It’s also where we are with the politics surrounding it.
For the beer brand’s part, they have done almost everything wrong with respect to brand management. Additionally, they’ve done so purposefully, out of both arrogance and total disregard for their core audience.
Politics comes in to play because the preferred narrative of how to explain what’s going on seems to be that this is yet another proof point as to the dangerous bigotry of the “Extreme MAGA” segment of America. Not to discount far-right extremism but the term “Extreme MAGA” is now being used by corporate, media, and political powers to describe any behavior they don’t understand or any opinion with which they disagree. This is very similar to how right-wing pundits and politicians use the term “woke.” It’s not really well defined. It’s just a pejorative label.
When those on the left see those who they view as philistines with AR-15s shooting up cases of Bud Light, it’s easy for them to explain the Bud Light fallout simply in terms a cretinous, transphobic response of a politically partisan audience that is also ignorant and unenlightened, i.e. “Extreme Mega.”
That narrative is a nice, neat, little gift box for the masses, but, from a branding perspective, it lacks the nuance of what is really going on here. It is far wiser, for those in the industry, to view the Bud Light story as a microcosm of the “us vs. them” ethos that now permeates a host of topics throughout America’s corporate created, brand-based, pop culture. Bud Light should be viewed as a kind of Rosetta Stone. This really is not a political story. Instead, it’s a story about hurt feelings. It’s a branding story that can provide useful insights to help decode many modern political phenomena, including, but not solely, Democratic Socialists as well as the rise of MAGA and the unfathomable allure of Donald J. Trump. Taken in this context, MAGA did not lead to the Bud Light fallout, but rather, both MAGA and the Bud Light fallout are the results of a similar, pernicious branding approach that compares, judges, and excludes rather than unite.
To explain, let’s start with a brief comparison of Bud Light and Donald Trump.
When it comes to the actual substance of Trump and Bud Light, let’s face it, neither one of these products is going to win any taste tests. Just like Bud Light is not a good beer, Donald Trump is not a good leader. They are both synthetically blended, mass marketed facsimiles of other products that are significantly better, but are also much more difficult to create, and far more costly to the end consumer. The appeal of Trump and Bud Light is not that they are good; it’s that they are accessible. You don’t have to be rich or educated or come from a particularly noble background to “get” either one of these products. Bordeaux and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are for the boujee. Trump and Bud Light; drink up everyone, this round is on me.
And that leads us to the great debacle – and why it’s likely to be far less about politics than it is about branding.
Bud Light is the number one selling beer in the United States. It’s the third highest selling beer in the world. Whether or not you believe Bud Light to be low class, base, piss-water is irrelevant. It’s enormously popular.
How did Bud Light get so popular? They built their brand by selling cheap, easy to find beer to a frat-boy/sports fan audience, while deploying and celebrating a goofy, sophomoric, often crass and even misogynistic sense of humor.
Over time that fraternity expanded to include hard-hats, farm workers, first responders, and anyone who respects and admires people who need to take a shower after work as opposed to before.
After literally decades of applauding, encouraging, and engaging with this audience, Bud Light hired a new VP of marketing who said, “I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor…”
Yes. Exactly!
The shocking part of what she said was not the acknowledgement that Bud Light had, for generations, cultivated an audience that’s fratty. That part of her statement just proves that their branding has worked wonderfully. It’s what she said next that was truly astonishing. She followed with “…and it was really important that we had another approach.”
What? Wait! Why?
Bud Light is the bestselling beer in America! Their “fratty” and “out of touch” audience spends around $4Billion a quarter on their product. That “fratty” audience has grown to include people of all stripes (40% female – 30% minority).
Nevertheless, the VP of marketing of the company told us that the audience with whom Bud Light has spent decades forming an emotional connection, the audience who made them the number one selling beer in in America, was no longer attractive to her. She stated, through what could only be assumed to be coastal elite, Ivy League, bias, that she believed her raison d’être was to move on to an audience that she viewed more attractive. In other words, the VP of Marketing believed that she, and those of her sensibilities, was the target audience.
Enter Dylan Mulvaney, doing a social media campaign mocking what is arguably the frat boy crowd’s most important college sports event, the Final Four, while simultaneously unveiling that she was now the new face of Bud Light (so much so that they put her likeness on the can).
“Dear Loyal Bud Light Customer,
You’re passé and the things that are important to you are stupid. Meet the face of your replacement. Isn’t she dreamy. Bye now.
Bud Light”
And then, when the fraternity acted like… well… frat-boys, oh my goodness!! The reaction from certain circles was, “I can’t believe how transphobic these MAGA redneck bastards are!!”
And this was just the first mistake.
At this point, Bud Light, and parent company Anheuser-Busch had a decision to make. They could have apologized profusely to their core audience for treating them as if they were ugly rejects with whom no reputable organization would want to be identified. A well thought out, highly produced, mea culpa might have been all it would’ve taken to prove contriteness and demonstrate undying loyalty to the fraternity.
OR
They could have doubled down on their decision to jettison their old audience by extolling the virtues of their new audience, demonstrating that they, as a company, have grown up, and that this new audience, though smaller and less inclined to drink beer, was more in line with the company’s core values. After all profits can never supersede principles.
Instead, Bud Light did neither.
After the wholly predictable backlash, came the second big mistake. “Sources close to senior leadership” leaked to the press that, “’no one at a senior level was aware” of the partnership, and “the decision to include Mulvaney in the campaign was made by a ‘low-level marketing staffer.’”
So, instead of owning up to their actions, the company tried to weasel out of it by having “sources close to senior leadership” throw some poor, imaginary, working-class schmuck (probably some fratty dude with a somewhat out of touch sense of humor) under the bus.
The most universally offensive part of this leaked statement is how overtly unbelievable it is. Anyone reading this would have immediately jumped to the conclusion, “they must think we’re stupid, too.”
Who could possibly buy that nobody at the senior level knew Bud Light spent a crap-ton of money to hire a new spokesperson while also designing and creating special, commemorative packaging to celebrate this decision. Remember, the VP of Marketing already spoke about the company’s need to move past the fratty, out of touch audience. Bud Light wants you to believe that a VP of Marketing for the brand is a “low level marketing staffer.” Puh-leeeeze!!
To make matters even worse, all this ridiculous, unbelievable posturing done to assuage their old audience had their new, progressive, LGBTQ+ audience starting to feel like the company wasn’t standing by them either. Activists quickly started publicly charging the company with pinkwashing.
The third colossal mistake happened when, after several days of silence, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch posted a letter that didn’t mention the issue, did not suggest they made any mistakes, didn’t take a side and, for all intents and purposes, simply said, “can we all get along?”
Here’s where this story turns into a Shakespearian tragic comedy. Magically, both the fratty old MAGA audience and the LGBTQ+ audience, the Capulets and Montagues, finally found common ground. They both said, “Hell to the no! You pitted us against each other. Now you must choose.”
In response, the company released a highly produced film ad that, loosely translated, said, “Yo. Frat-boys. Our stock is down, we’ve shed about $6 Billion in corporate value. Sales are off anywhere between 10%-50%. We’ve got country-western stars changing the lyrics to their songs and restaurant chains refusing to sell our product. You drink a lot more beer than the LGBTQ+ crowd. If we pander to your patriotism with pictures of US flags and Clydesdales, will you please spend your money on us again?”
Alas, even using the all-powerful “‘Merica” incantation failed to compel their old, out of touch, fratty audience to come back to the brand… yet. Additionally, their new LGBTQ+ audience suspected the entire campaign was nothing more than dishonest pandering. Bud Light literally killed two birds with one ill-thought-out stone.
To be sure, it is highly unlikely Anheuser-Busch will feel any real, long-term financial impact from all of these blunders. They are a massive, multibillion dollar a year alcohol conglomerate. Any short-term impact to Bud Light sales will easily be made up for by the 32 other beer brands in their portfolio. The only realistic casualty of all of this will be that the VP of Marketing, after taking her well-deserved leave of absence, will write a “it is with mixed emotions blah blah blah… I’m thankful for this transformative opportunity blah, blah, blah … I’m excited about the next chapter blah, blah, blah…” email not too long from now.
If she’s opportunistic enough, she will rebrand herself as a culture warrior who paid the ultimate professional price for attempting to bring a modicum of DEI into the old-boy, fratty, “Extreme MAGA” culture that is the beer industry. Maybe there’s a book deal and a guest slot on AC 360 in her future?
By that time, a fresh group of fraternity brothers, hard hats, and farm workers will be waking up to the realization that they don’t have enough money to get drunk on Bordeaux. Bud Light, of course, will be well on its way to launching a new marketing campaign targeting those guys.
So, what are the branding lessons the rest of us should learn from this Bud Light morality play? Well, they’re all common sense, as long as the fact that a brand is an emotional connection is kept at the forefront.
- It’s not enough to know your audience. You need to understand their emotions as well. Emotions are powerful, and if you mess with people’s emotions you also need to be prepared to feel their wrath afterwards.
- Loyalty matters, and it works both ways. If you’re not loyal to your customers, you can’t expect them to be loyal to you.
- You cannot expand your audience by alienating them. You can only, maybe, change your audience that way.
- Critique through comparison (i.e. here’s why we like this group of people better than that group of people) creates resentment and drives people apart. It never brings people together.
- If you’re going to pick a side, admit it, own the decision, and live with the consequences. No excuses. No Proxies. And don’t play the victim after you pick your side. (But, if you can avoid it, if there is no moral imperative to it, it’s always better to avoid picking a side)
- If you do pick a side, don’t be surprised when the members of the side you rejected treat both you and the side you picked poorly.
- A pretend apology is 10x worse than no apology at all. Either apologize or don’t.
- Don’t ever lie … even, or especially, if it’s done to CYA. Put another way, “the cover up is worse than the crime.”
Now, close your eyes and imagine a country in which these branding lessons were also applied to politics.