The real story of the decline and fall of Bud Light is not really about a poorly conceived advertising gimmick. It is about the capacity of regular people to make or break whole brands and companies.
We had nearly forgotten that this was possible. But to reduce the #1-selling brand of beer in America to a bar joke represents genuine power. It also signifies a return to a genuine capitalist ethos in which regular people determine winners and losers in the marketplace. Indeed, under a properly functioning market, consumers ultimately determine all decisions over the use of resources.
Here’s another story of a social-media platform trumpeted by all the most powerful people in media and technology. It came from the shop of Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook/Meta. He signed up to be Fauci’s censor during COVID and eventually turned over the whole of the world’s phonebook to the national security state. All of his friends were saying that Twitter is a cesspool of hate and that there needs to be a clean alternative. They urged him to make it happen.
The result was his new idea: “Threads.” It would be a version of Twitter except with strict content moderation. He populated the platform from Instagram users and trumpeted how many millions had instantly signed up. As an Instagram user, I was nagged to push the button. Instead I pushed another button. I deleted the whole of my account. I suspect many others did the same.
Meanwhile, all the top business press celebrated his great achievement. The Wall Street Journal blared a headline that Zuckerberg was cool again following his last disaster with the metaverse. Everyone wants to belong to his new social network, they said. And then barely two weeks later, the same paper grudgingly ran a new headline: user engagement has declined by 70 percent.
Can you imagine? Seventy percent! That’s essentially dead on arrival. He cheated and wrapped up his new copycat tech into his old network (which he didn’t build but rather bought) and then claimed victory. But then there was a problem: no one wanted to use it. The reason is pretty simple. He started taking down posts on the first day, since that was the whole pitch of the platform. It turns out that “we censor” was not a good marketing pitch.
How in the world did a person like Zuckerberg, to say nothing of his many advisors, come to believe that a heavily censored social media network would be in high demand? It’s pretty simple. They live in a bubble. Everyone they know wants a heavily censored social media platform. These elites extrapolate from their own social experience out to the whole of the public. Which is to say: they are totally out of touch.
That pretty much defines the essential sociological characteristic of government and corporate elites today: isolating and uncomprehending of the customers they serve. All it takes is one small trigger to wake up the consuming public and their empires can slip away as quickly as Threads went from awesome to dead in a fortnight. All it takes is an aware public. Digital media has long relied on consumers who sign up for trash and forget about it as their credit card is dinged month after month. Once people catch on, the jig is up. Same goes for free services. No one wants an account with a company that is doing evil.
We are on the cusp of a new consumer movement in this country and maybe around the world. For too long, consumers have underestimated their power. I don’t mean at the ballot box. I mean the everyday voting booth of the marketplace. No company can survive without acquiescence of the buying public. As the Bud Light and Threads cases make clear, if people don’t participate, they die the death.
You don’t need “boycotts.” You only need people declining to prop up evil.
In the end, economics is a more powerful force than all the left-wing dreams of the crowd pushing ESG, DEI, and the rest of the alphabet of woke theorizing. They have their wishes on what companies can do but they can only get away with this stuff if you have a cooperative public to go along with it. If the buyers unplug all of these companies will have the life drained out of them. Given their high leverage, they cannot survive with declining sales.
Just how new is this movement? For the better part of a century, we’ve lived in a transactional culture that encourages everyone to buy, buy, buy whatever it is without thinking. Just be grateful for what you can get when you can get it. But that sensibility is starting to go away as people are increasingly aware of the unity of big business and government. The lockdowns served as a huge reminder of the power they have over us.
This hegemon does not have our best interests at heart. Today there is a burning public desire to put all these institutions in their place.
In the 19th century, a popular term to describe the free market was laissez-faire. It means that government should leave the market alone to function. But as Ludwig von Mises often said, it does NOT mean mindless consumerism and accepting whatever is tossed at you. Genuine laissez-faire involves an educated public that rationally plans their economic lives to fit with their values. We are waking up to this today.
Part of the reason is the political crisis in the land but it is also the health crisis, which has been created in part due to poor diet (tracing to government regulation of food) and pharmaceuticals (tracing to the monopoly over medicines and medical services). There are options out there. You just have to have the wits to figure them out. It’s never been more necessary.
One huge change I’ve made is to stop buying when possible from big-box grocery stores and finding cheaper and healthier alternatives such as small groceries and farmers markets. It’s changed everything for me, especially in these inflationary times. It’s surprising but the small stores with lower overhead have been better able to deal with rising costs than the big chains. And it feels right to support those who have been so systematically abused over these last several years.
All of which takes us back to Bud Light. For the beer drinkers out there, they are much better off choosing brands that have their value systems straight. That often involves local brews. It’s great to support them. Why support corporate monoliths that are promoting social and political revolution when you can use your dollars to back old-fashioned free enterprise?
The “free” part of “enterprise” was not ruined by enterprise itself; it was wrecked by the state in cooperation with the biggest businesses and their financial partners. The fight for freedom must include the restoration of the “free” part of markets.
I dream of the day when all those massive companies that cooperated so closely with government bite the dust. Indeed I would like to see Facebook go the way of MySpace. It surely will in time.
You can help that along. Indeed, your buying decisions can topple whole companies and reorganize the entire production structure. It’s one way to change the world. You are powerful. It’s good to remember that and act on it whenever possible.
