St. Louis beer giant Anheuser-Busch continues to face a backlash from consumers after its decision to use transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesman. So bad is the backlash that even gay bars are seeing a drop in sales of Bud Light.
“I think society flexes its muscles sometimes and reminds manufacturers that the consumer is still in charge,” Jeff Fitter, owner of Case & Bucks, a restaurant and sports bar in Barnhart, Mo., told Fox Business. “In Bud Light’s effort to be inclusive, they excluded almost everybody else, including their traditional audience.”
Sales of Anheuser-Busch bottled products dropped 30 percent over the past week, while draught beer plummeted 50 percent, he said. Similar stories are found around the country. The company has lost $5 billion in value according to market analysts.
Bud Light usually outsells rival products Miller Lite and Coors Light 25 to 1 at Braintree Brewhouse in Massachusetts, a sprawling sports bar just outside Boston. Not this week. Eighty percent of Bud Light drinkers ordered something else this week, Brewhouse owner Alex Kesaris said, while the 20 percent who did order Bud Light “weren’t on social media and hadn’t heard yet” about its new transgender pitch person.
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“They didn’t order it again,” he said, after other patrons told them about the Bud Light marketing misfire.
One pub in Hell’s Kitchen, a New York City neighborhood known for its large and vocal gay community, reported that Bud Light draft sales dropped 58 percent this week, while Bud Light bottle sales were down 70 percent.
Bud Light’s decision to dive into the culture wars was a “bad decision” that defied “virtually every rule in building brands and marketing,” a national beer-industry analyst said. He cited a nightmare scenario for Bud Light sales reps in Texas, where the brand has for years has sponsored a large weekly dart league with 100-plus players each Thursday night The bar sold only four 12-ounce Bud Light bottles this week.
“They’ve already done enough damage in one week to disrupt yearlong sales projections,” a beer-sales representative who works with national beer retailers such as Costco said. “You don’t just make up those sales. People aren’t going to drink twice as much Bud Light the following weekend to recover the lost business.”
For a brand as large as Bud Light, the public relations calamity already represents millions of lost dollars, even if the consumer revolt ended tomorrow.
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice