It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The idea within Anheuser-Busch was that its traditional buyers were a given, a clan to be taken for granted. The whole point of marketing, as it’s taught in the high-end schools (as if professors know about this stuff) is that reaching new and underserved markets is always the way forward. So one has to keep one’s finger on the pulse of progress, recast the brand, get new eyes on the product, turn the kaleidoscope just a bit, toss out a few manipulative symbols, and boom, you capture another slice of the market.
What Bud Light marketing head Alissa Heinerscheid did—send a customized can of beer to the owner of a popular Instagram account—was nothing particularly radical. The theory is that one can of beer could do the work of an ad campaign that would otherwise cost millions. The influencer would certainly take the bait and post the can, thus reaching the 1.8 million people who follow his faux-trans cosplay and thus make the brand seem hip, happening, and progressive.
It was to be the perfect unfolding of a move from a very conventional playbook. In theory, there are market segments. Social media allows corporations to identify them and target them directly and uniquely. No big deal. And it might have worked too, but the marketing geniuses missed something important.
Namely, they massively misunderstood why it is that people follow this messed up boy named Dylan Mulvaney who pretends to be a girl of his own caricature. They follow him for the same reason that people slow down on the highway to look at the auto accident. It’s called “rubbernecking.” You slow down and look to see the bent metal and shattered glass and if anyone is on a stretcher. You also slow down with a sense of gratitude that it happened to them and not you.
You certainly don’t slow down to look at a car crash with a sense of admiration and a desire to emulate. So for Bud Light to send a celebratory can to this person was to completely misunderstand the situation and flip it upside down. Bud Light was cheering on a person whom most of his own followers regard as a pathetic freak. It’s a circus act. Heinerscheid, now on leave, mistook voyeurism for popularity.
And so the mistake leaked out of Dylan’s following to the whole of Instagram and was amplified in all social media and further in ever greater waves of disgust throughout the whole of media and all the way to the beer’s base of drinkers. They were disgusted and angry that the beer executives could have become so thoroughly confused.
That’s when matters got entirely out of control. The boycotts began, leading to a stock price fall and a massive consumer boycott. Bud Light has fallen some 30 percent in sales, and the entirety of Anheuser-Busch InBev is in crisis, with other brands owned by the company falling flat. Everything has been affected, including Michelob, Shock Top, Rolling Rock, Landshark, Goose Island, Stella Artois, and Corona.
Today, people enjoy posting images of 12 packs of Bud Light sitting at stores and marked down to $3 and still not selling. They can’t even give the stuff away. So Anheuser-Busch is going further and offering to buy back its own product from distributors before the “buy by” date passes. A former executive warned that this isn’t going away. Distributors are pleading with the customer base to come back.
Other huge errors along the way included the corporate response. No doubt that the company tapped some “crisis management” experts who first counseled the company to clam up until the whole thing blew over. That didn’t work and only made people more angry. Finally, the CEO crafted some pathetic statement about nothing. Then, the beer started making “real America” ads with dudes shaking hands and so on. That looked very cynical and only added to the fury.
One has to feel awful for all the drivers, distributors, and retailers harmed in the course of this upheaval. But the real blame rests not with the boycotts but rather with the executives who made this decision. They imagine themselves to be in touch with the pulse of the market, but they missed the most significant movement in America today: the mass revolt against the elites who are shoving “woke” ideology down our throats from every institution. It’s affecting schools, government, media, and technology.
Integral to woke ideology is a detached elitism that cares nothing about how people aspire to live their lives. They want to live in peaceful and stable communities, marry well, and raise good kids who aren’t insane, go on to have solid jobs, and become respectable and patriotic members of the community. Woke theory has nothing but disdain for such bourgeois aspirations and so attempts to thwart them at every turn.
For three years especially, but also dating back long before, average Americans have felt powerless in the face of the woke hegemon. It has invaded every aspect of our lives such that it has become inescapable. The hosts on the bubble vision seem completely oblivious to why Trump won in 2016 and remains popular today. The tour guides at famous monuments show disgust toward the Founding Fathers and American history. The textbooks at school preach gender fluidity and hatred of settled religious tradition.
This stuff is everywhere. It all gives the impression of an America secretly administered by a hegemonic junta that has no regard for normal life aspirations. The lockdowns, forced masking, and vaccine mandates put a fine point on it. The people who doubted the “science” behind the intentional wreckage were dismissed as “right-wingers” controlled by “conspiracy theorists.”
The whole situation has become unsustainable. The 1 percent simply can’t impose its will on the 99 percent forever and expect that everyone will put up with it. Vast numbers of people have been searching for some outlet to let their presence and influence be known, just some peaceful means of revolt. The Bud Light fiasco offered that perfect opportunity.
So yes, it represents a pushback against the aggressive marketing of trans ideology, but it’s about much more than that. The boycott of this one beer—which could eventually kill the brand permanently and even seriously harm the company in the long run—is a mode of expressing the power of the people against the ruling class. It’s a demonstration of the power of democracy itself, something this country has specialized in since at least the Boston Tea Party.
What’s intriguing is how this one event has completely upended the profession called marketing. Since the 1950s, marketing has always been about getting ahead of the next new stage in what we call progress, capturing it in slogans and songs, and becoming the thing everyone needs to buy. The beer executives thought that’s what they were doing, but they completely missed a much more powerful movement that’s pretty well fed up with having their values trashed by corporate and government elites.
It turns out that the next new thing isn’t the latest iteration of the long alphabet of gender fluidity but the revolt for the restoration of what we used to call the good life. It'll be a long time until the business schools adapt to the new reality, but marketing departments in major corporations can’t wait. They’re today doing everything possible to avoid the fate of Bud Light.
In this sense, this is a major turning point in the push to regain control of our own destiny. They can tax away our earnings, destroy the currency, force their dangerous medicines on us, embroil us in pointless foreign wars, and surveil our digital lives. But we still have a few freedoms left. One of them is the freedom to choose which beer we'll drink. That much has been reestablished, but it’s about a lot more than that.
The historical trajectory of our times has included a full range of completely surprising twists and turns. That the nationwide and really global revolt against the elites would take the form of a vast consumer boycott of a watery beer is surely among the most surprising. It could have a lasting effect on the shape of the future.
