How Bud Light’s Transgender Marketing Campaign Backfired and Caused Sales to Plummet

When Alissa Heinerscheid, 39, was appointed head of marketing for brewer Anheuser-Busch in June 2022, she said to herself that the decline in sales had to be stemmed by rejuvenating the brand. Anheuser-Busch is the inventor of the famous Budweiser Light, a light beer brewed by German immigrants in Saint-Louis, on the banks of the Mississippi, since 1876. So, M^me Heinerscheid had the idea of ​​offering a personalized beer can to Dylan Mulvaney, a star transgender influencer received by Joe Biden at the White House.

The 1^is April, Dylan Mulvaney broadcasts to his 1.8 million subscribers a video on instagram in which she celebrates the first anniversary of her transition into a woman and shows, all smiles, a Bud Light can with her photo, “the best gift possible”. It’s the explosion. In the eleven days following the release of the video, Bud Light was mentioned more than 1 million times on social media, fifty times more than in the previous eleven days.

Counter-influencers respond to the influencer: musician Kid Rock posts a video in which he shoots boxes of Bud Light with a submachine gun (1.8 million views on Instagram), while country singer Travis Tritt declares that he will stop offering Bud Light on his tours.

Beer delivery men attacked

The brand’s reputation is collapsing. Some customers mistakenly believe that the cans will be marketed with the photo of Dylan Mulvaney, when it was a unique gift. In May, Bud Light is no longer the preferred brand of only 15% of beer drinkers, against 22% a year earlier. THE Wall Street Journal explains how beer delivery people get picked on by customers or resellers.

Sales are collapsing, inexorably: in May, according to the Nielsen panel quoted in a study by the financial analysis firm TD Cowen, sales of Bud Light are down more than 20% compared to the year. former. Its share price has fallen from a high of 67 dollars (62.53 euros) at the end of March to less than 55 dollars today: 21 billion dollars of value erased for a 45-second video.

The image is damaged, beer being a product consumed during festive, public or friendly events: it is then necessary to “assume”. The trouble is that the company has hardly assumed, dissatisfying both its customers and LGBT + advocacy groups. “We never intended to enter into a debate that divides people. Our job is to bring people together over a beer”said Brendan Whitworth, managing director of the American activities of AB InBev, the Belgian parent company.

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