Amid the continued controversy and reported boycott of Bud Light due to its using transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney in an ad campaign, experts said that while parent company Anheuser-Busch won’t be crippled, its reputation will be tarnished.
“I simply don’t understand why they hired the person who was doing the marketing,” Oxygen Financial CEO Ted Jenkin told Fox News. “I mean, if your target customer is Kid Rock, and then all of a sudden you decide to go to RuPaul, that just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Bud Light, he noted, generally targets “blue-collar workers and younger adults that are 25 to 29 years old. So, I don’t think that this one campaign is going to colossally destroy the brand.”
“But certainly short term, it puts doubt into their loyal drinkers of Bud Light to say, ‘Do I want to continue to be drinking Bud Light based upon who they’re showing representing Bud Light?’” he asked. “Anytime a company puts on a national spokesperson that has backlash, it certainly can affect your business.”
“Look what happened with Paula Deen and Bill Cosby and Lance Armstrong, and they were famous people,” he noted. “Now we’re just talking about a transgender influencer ... so, certainly there can be a trickle-down effect.”
In an article, National Center for Public Policy Research fellow Scott Shepard wrote that Anheuser-Busch is owned by InBev, one of the largest drinks makers in the world, and that a single product likely won’t have a huge impact on the company’s overall value.
He noted that the “bottom-line effects of wokeness are clearer at other American companies that have abandoned fiduciary duty for politics,” referring to large corporations’ having adopted left-wing talking points and narratives around race and sex.
Mulvaney, who previously visited the White House and is now part of advertising campaigns with Nike and Kate Spade, said earlier this month that the popular beer company sent packs of Bud Light with his likeness on the cans as part of an ad campaign. Another video then featured Mulvaney in a bathtub while drinking a Bud Light beer as part of the campaign.
“The customers decide. Customers are king,” Rich told Fox News host Tucker Carlson this week. “I own a bar in downtown Nashville called Redneck Riviera. Our number-one selling beer up until a few days ago was what? Bud Light. We got cases and cases and cases of it sitting back there. But in the past several days, you’re hard-pressed to find anyone ordering one. So as a business owner, I go, hey if you aren’t ordering it, we got to put something else in here. At the end of the day, that’s capitalism. That’s how it works.”
Some industry analysts, meanwhile, have written that Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light distributors in some areas have expressed concern about the move.
“This boycott seems to have more legs than most,” Justin Kendall, editor of beer industry trade publication Brewbound, told the New York Post earlier this week. “It started out as a conversation on social media and has breached into mainstream media.”
Amid the controversy, Anheuser-Busch issued a statement to several news outlets that “this commemorative can was a gift to celebrate a personal milestone and is not for sale to the general public,” referring to the Mulvaney cans.
“Anheuser-Busch works with hundreds of influencers across our brands as one of many ways to authentically connect with audiences across various demographics. From time to time we produce unique commemorative cans for fans and for brand influencers, like Dylan Mulvaney,” it said.
