Opinion
By Dave Scott, 4-28-23
Anheuser-Bush spent 42 years building Bud Light into one of the most popular beers in the country for men. It took less than a week for the company’s woke VP of marketing to destroy the iconic brand.
Instead of creating marketing programs to strengthen its customer base and promote and sell Bud Light to new consumers, Alissa Heinerscheid, the brand’s marketing VP, turned that concept upside down and did the exact opposite. She converted the former “King of Beers” into the “Drag Queen of Beers” and consumers are calling for her head!
She blew Bud Light out of the beer barrel when she plastered a ceremonial can emblazoned with a picture of a guy – Dylan Mulvaney – dressed as a woman on it. The move tanked the company’s sales and its market value by billions of dollars.
Since its introduction in 1982 Bud Light built a highly profitable reputation by appealing to guys….guys who watch and play sports, live in frat houses, barbeque at tailgate parties, etc. Their target audience doesn’t relate to men like Mulvaney drinking Bud Light in a tub of bubble-bath while wearing a bra and prancing around in women’s clothing, lipstick, earrings, and high heels.
Ms. Heinerscheid, who singlehandedly demolished the beer’s reputation, has been placed on an involuntary leave of absence, the brewer says. According to an article in AdAge Ms. Heinerscheid “circumvented the proper approval channels.” She’s lucky she got out of the building alive.
She had been with the company less than 11 months. Her boss, Daniel Blake, who oversaw marketing for Anheuser-Bush, is also on an involuntary leave of absence. Wanna bet they don’t come back or land at any other company that values marketing? However, Nike, Disney, and the NBA would be good fits for this now unemployed pair of misguided marketing misfits.
Two days after an online post with the transvestite Mulvaney’s picture on a Bud Light can appeared numerous videos were shared showing consumers dumping their Bud Light products in trash bins and down sinks — and violently destroying Bud Light cans of the beer.
Here on Amelia Island a number of bartenders, and managers of liquor stores, bars and restaurants, and their owners told me that Bud Light sales are almost nonexistent. A bartender at the Amelia Island American Legion Post 54 said she hasn’t sold any.
If it’s a local boycott, it’s a quiet one. People are just not buying the stuff. Grocery store shelves I’ve seen are chock-a-block full of Bud Light while other brands appear to be moving briskly. Publix and Winn Dixie had Bud Light cases marked down to $20.13 for a case of 24, the lowest price that I’ve seen for it in months. Cases of Miller, Coors, etc. were priced around $26.
Further south of Amelia Island, Grills Seafood Deck and Tiki Bar owner Joe Penovich said the beverage company marketer “knew EXACTLY what she was doing when she launched this campaign. How could you not? ‘Good ole boy beer…meets Dylan Mulvaney? Hmm. Let’s see what that does.’ NOBODY is that stupid.” His Cape Canaveral restaurant has stopped selling Bud Light and he says he will not resume sales of the beer.
Several celebrities have also joined in the fun.
For example, country music star Travis Tritt revealed that he’d be deleting Anheuser-Busch products from his tour hospitality rider. Rock star Kid Rock was filmed using Bud Light cans for target practice with guns.
If it hasn’t already happened the two VP’s leaves of absence will undoubtedly lead to their firings once the furor dies down. And these two oblivious wokesters should be fired along with the Anheuser Busch executive team that oversaw this debacle. The Human Resources group that hires people like them should also be told to hit the bricks.
Heinerscheid shouldn’t worry about future employment. Based on the current circus in the Biden White House, she’s probably assured of a position there.
Mulvaney, the guy who says he’s a gal, is considered to be a social media “influencer” and he’s obviously good at it. For example, he has successfully influenced beer drinkers to stop buying Bud Light. In the week ending April 15 it was reported that Bud light’s retail sales fell 18% .
(An abridged version of my commentary above ran in the Thursday, April 27 National Biz Pac Review https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/04/27/from-the-king-of-beers-to-the-drag-queen-of-beers-1353966/ )
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Heinerscheid – A Beer Marketing Genius? Well, not for Bud Light but for its competitors. While she destroyed Bud Light’s sales, the retailing efforts of the firm’s rivals, Coors Light and Miller Lite, grew 17.6%.
A guy calling himself “Conservative Dad” has capitalized on Bud Light’s misery and launched a brand called “Ultra Right” selling for $19.99 a six pack. Now that’s how marketing is done!
Former Bud Light drinkers are also turning to brands like Yuengling, which features ads boasting of its long American heritage.
“Yuengling. The Oldest Brewery In America,” says its ad featuring an American flag in the background. “Independently Owned and Family Operated since 1829 because we make good beer.”
In these ads there’s no babbling about drag queens and posting their simpering faces and there’s nothing to do with “equity.” They’re simply ads for the one thing Americans who like beer are looking for: good beer.
Heinerscheid’s ouster follows a recent interview she did with a “Make Yourself At Home” podcast in which she touted her efforts at making Bud Light’s marketing more “inclusive” and, ultimately, leftist.
“I’m a businesswoman, I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was this brand is in decline, it’s been in a 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.”
She said she wanted to “evolve and elevate” Bud Light’s image and she said that “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.”
She missed those targets by a mile while attacking the brand’s past successful marketing efforts and its current customer base.
“You gotta see people who reflect you in the work. I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach,” she babbled.
The Harvard graduate failed spectacularly with her ideological idiocy and probably earned herself a Harvard Case Study right alongside the 1985 “New Coke” marketing catastrophe.
Former Anheuser-Busch executive Anson Fredicks told the Wall Street Journal that the company made a huge mistake. “I think now is the time to go back, and, for companies like Anheuser-Busch to say that, hey, moving forward for brands like Bud Light, we’re not going to be political. We’re not going to get involved in the Environmental Social Governance movement, because that’s not what the customer wants,” he said.
“What the customer wants with Bud Light is they want to have things that bring us together,” he added. “They want humor. They want the Dilly Dilly guys, they want football. They want the things that bind us together as coequal citizens here, not necessarily having Bud Light get involved in political controversies that tear us apart.”
Sorry pal, it’s too late, the brand has gone flat.
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Transgenderism: The New Blackface: Over the past weekend, media personality Oli London retweeted a post of Dylan Mulvaney “getting glam” with Maybelline, which has apparently joined the ranks of companies who think the best way to market products to women is by mocking them. If Bud Light’s is any indication, the damages will be much more than cosmetic.
Within hours, the post went viral, lighting up social media with calls to #BoycottMaybelline. Several of London’s followers were at a loss, trying to make sense of the company’s rationale. “Why are all of these companies so intent on insulting women?” one asked. This is “a dude who portrays women as ditzy bimbos,” another fumed.
Customer Melanie Johnson agreed, pointing out that “craziest thing about all of this” is that “we do not act like this when we put on our makeup [and] workout and honestly most of us don’t have time for a six pack of Bud Light while taking a bubble bath. We are usually taking care of children, our homes and working. This is not a representation of women at all. WTF[.]”
Madeleine Kearns wrote on National Review, “transgenderism is the new blackface. Perhaps the greatest silver lining of the transgender movement has been how it exposes the follies of disregarding sex and sexual difference. ‘Womanface’ is the new blackface. It’s time to get outraged.”
Fox News also pulled what many see as a Budweiser move, booting wildly popular host Tucker Carlson who was their main draw without allegedly giving him a reason why and causing its stock to tank.
The parent company of Fox News saw its stock drop by more than 5% in value just minutes after it announced the network was parting ways with Carlson, according to Business Insider.
Who’s next to fall in this woke mad marketing maelstrom?
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Oh Wait! Never Mind: Remember when your family advised you to work hard, save your money and pay your bills on time because you would eventually be rewarded?
Joe Biden says never mind all that rightwing pandering parental poppycock. Democrats are a party of losers and slackers. If you’re one of them you’ll be amply rewarded if you keep voting for them they promise. Want to buy a house but don’t have enough money or your credit score resembles Biden’s approval ratings? No problem says Biden and his Democrats.
The Biden administration is proposing an income redistribution scheme that will increase mortgage fees for borrowers with good credit scores in order to subsidize deadbeats and losers.
Under Biden’s new rule, which is set to go into effect May 1, home buyers with good credit scores over 680 will pay about $40 more each month on a $400,000 loan and upward, depending on the size of the loan. Those who make down payments of 20 percent or more will pay the highest fee. This money will be used to subsidize Biden’s high-risk loser borrowers.
Oh, Biden’s student debt forgiveness program is another Democrat handout, that takes money from people who didn’t go to college to pay for those that did, even if they went to pricey Ivy League institutions and even if they didn’t graduate.
All of this is called socialism or buying votes. The loan scam will most certainly lead to a housing crisis by selling people houses they can’t afford, not to mention the unfairness of it all by punishing people who maintained good credit.
Like most things in the rabbit hole called the Biden administration and the Democrat party, it makes no sense.
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Things I Wish I’d Said: “The modern university seems to see its mission as turning blacks against whites, women against men, and gays against straights. And they’re doing a fine job of it. How lucky I was to attend college when professors were merely dotty, and my English classes were about literature.” – Larry Thornberry, Tampa Plant High School classmate and friend, and American Spectator writer.
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Read All About It: The annual tabloid parody newspaper, The Amelia Island News Wrecker, is at the printer and will be distributed to various restaurants, bars, hotels, B&B’s, etc. around Amelia Island this coming week if all goes as planned. Stampeding water buffalo, sea creatures eating tourists, a beach Iditarod, and more, are all accurately covered in this issue.
Republished with the author’s permission. Read The Dave Scott Blog– subscribe Free
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
