They will be more careful to just talk beer in the future
Murica!
without coming out and saying the words: We’re sorry to have f*****up and we won’t insult our customer base again, the good folks at Anheuser-Busch might have hoped this would reverse or slow the sales drop they have experienced so far:
Bud Light sales continued to worsen for the week ended April 29, NielsenIQ data showed, amid controversy around the brand’s partnership with a transgender influencer.
The country’s No. 1-selling beer brand saw in-store sales of $71.6 million that week, off 23.4% from the same week in 2022.
The company will provide “direct financial support” to workers, including delivery drivers, sales representatives, wholesalers and bar owners, Doukeris said.
Because apparently you can’t make a living selling Anheuser-Busch anymore in the US.
This means several things:
This isn’t going to change until you get an explicit apology from Anheuser Busch
The company is going to have to be willing to take the short term media hit when they do
The salutary effects this is having on other companies thinking of going woke will continue
The left will be desperate for a scalp to generate greater fear than this boycott has
In the end AB will have to choose between the gay bars in Chicago and the vast swath of beer drinkers, If their primary fear as individuals is dealing with angry leftists a permanent drop of 25% in sales might be acceptable. To a company actually interested in the bottom line it would be an easy choice.
The clock is ticking because if the decide to keep stalling eventually people will get used to their new choices in beer and the game will be over.
I’ve noted in the past that the biggest problem for Anheuser Busch is that it’s very very easy to boycott Bud Light so if they want to stop the bleeding in the US they will have to take actual pro-active action to do so.
Everyone knows this but nobody knows this more than the folks at the LGBTQ community so called “human rights campaign” who realize that their ability to push their agenda through cooperate intimidation can come to a screeching halt if companies decide that the potential cost of keeping the professional protester class appeased is outweighed by the cost to the bottom line, particularly for companies where there are easy alternatives to their product available.
So they are keeping the pressure on Anheuser Bush not only to just stay silent on the matter but to double down:
The Human Rights Campaign is calling on Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Bud Light, to publicly reaffirm its support for the transgender community following weeks of right-wing pushback over the brewing company’s recent partnership with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
In a letter sent this week to Anheuser-Busch’s head of human resources, Jay Brown, a senior vice president at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, slammed the company’s response to the controversy as insufficient and cowardly.
“In this moment, it is absolutely critical for Anheuser-Busch to stand in solidarity with Dylan and the trans community,” reads the April 26 letter obtained by The Hill.
So far Anheuser Busch has declined to meet with these folks as they understand how it would be received by a customer base already walking away. The real danger for the Bud folks is that one people start getting used to buying another brand it becomes easier for them to continue to do so, that’s marketing 101.
It all comes down to this: Is the potential permanent damage the Mulvaney business has caused greater than the damage the HRC folks can do, or to put it another way. Are the HRC crowd Anheuser Bush drinkers in general and/or Bud Light drinkers in particular?
If the answer is “yes” then Anheuser Bush will likely at best wait this out and take the hit they’ve gotten or at worse cave and risk a 2nd drop.
If the answer is “no” and I suspect it is, then our best move is to keep the pressure on because many other companies are watching to see how this plays out.
Those companies are the real target of the HRC letter and those companies are the reason why we need to dramatically demonstrate that caving has a price and until they are more scared of us then they are of them, nothing will change.
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