Posts Tagged ‘bud light’

Bud Light and the Jon Sable Rule

Posted: June 8, 2023 by datechguy in culture, economy, Uncategorized
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Jon Sable: I get twenty five percent of anything I recover

Sherman: That’s kind of steep isn’t it?

Jon Sable: Depends on how you look at it. I figure 75% of something is better than 100% of nothing

Jon Sable Freelance Issue 8 1984

I’ve been watching headline after headline over the last several weeks about Bud Light’s sales down 10, 15 25% or more and for a lot of conservatives like me I find it very satisfying. The hit they have taken and will continue to take has resulted in headlines that are even more important, like this one:

In interviews with various executives, it is made clear that these companies are calculating all the costs and benefits of speaking out on a given topic. At least one company “uses an internal scoring system to determine if, and when, it makes sense for the company to comment on matters that may offend some of its customers and employees or affect its brands.” In light of recent events, though, this company “reexamined an older evaluation process.”

This is all to the good and if your goal is to stop companies from jumping onto the left’s bandwagon it’s a welcome development.

But if you are thinking this is going to cause Bud light to apologize or actually go under, forget it.

There is no way they are going to do so because they rightly figure all this will do is bring down the wrath of the left establishment who while smaller are relentless and supported by traditional and social media.

Secondly they’re not sure that this will get them back the customers they’ve lost. Bud light has become a symbol of something a vast swath of the population hates and too much time has passed for this to change.

But the third reason is the biggest one, and that’s the math.

Let’s assume that Anheuser-Busch is selling 25% Less Bud light then they did a year ago, that still means that they are selling 75% of the beer they were selling.

Now that 25% drop is a big deal when all that beer is already in the loop, but now enough time has passed so AB could cut production so you don’t have 1 out of every four bottles of Bud Light going bad.

Does that mean less profits, well sure. When you sell 75% of what you were selling a year ago that hurts your bottom line. Particularly if you’re producing 25% more of a product then you need.

But if you’re selling 75% of what you were a year ago and PRODUCING 75% less then you’re still making that profit on that 75% and not taking the loss on excess production and labor.

Would they rather be selling what they were before? Sure they would , but I think these guys aren’t going to take chances and let’s face it there are plenty of companies who would kill to have the level of sales that 75% of Bud Light’s former sales are.

Yeah we’ll still have fun headlines and even great stories like this:

The cousins founded Appalachian Mountain Brewery (AMB) in 2011 in their early 20s. They entered a partnership with the Craft Brew Alliance and eventually became part of Anheuser-Busch’s craft beer portfolio. AMB became known as the first brewery in Boone.

Recently, AMB became the first craft brewers to ever buy themselves back from Anheuser-Busch in a move that signals a win for the little guy in the beer circuit and another step forward for the state’s beer scene. Asheville has one of the highest amounts of breweries per capita in the U.S.

But the reality is that Bud Light as a brand isn’t going to die, it will be smaller and make less than it did, but it will still be alive and make a profit, just not as big as they used to.

As Ace Rothstein said at the end of the Movie Casino:

But in the end I wound up right back where I started. I could still pick winners and I could still make money for all kinds of people back home. So why mess up a good thing? So That’s that.

The mainstream media was wrong about Bud Light: Boycotts work

Posted: May 28, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, culture, media, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

We’re approaching the two-month mark of the Bud Light boycott, which of course began when transgender social media, utilizing his–yes his–goofy 1950s-sitcom ditz schtick to recklessly promote Bud Light beer. 

Immediately, I was confident that this boycott had staying power, despite the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media telling its dwindling audience it did not. As Da Tech Guy himself explained, Anheuser-Busch’s problem is that Bud Light is too easy to boycott. Coors Light, Miller Lite, which taste similar–assuming that light beers have a distinguishable taste–are usually available in the same liquor stores, supermarkets, bars, and restaurants. And they are all priced about the same. 

American megabrewers are selling image and personality. Beer? Not so much. And in a few days, Bud Light, after partnering with Mulvaney, torched its macho brand-building work of four decades in just a few days. “Fratty” is the word used by the now-on-leave marketing head for Bud Light, Alissa Heinerscheid. Anheuser-Busch’s non-apology from its CEO only fanned the flames. 

Bud Light’s slogan is, “Easy to drink, easy to enjoy.” And it’s easy to boycott.

I have to reach back to Monty Python’s Flying Circus to find a worse marketing campaign. 

Boss (John Cleese character): Now, let’s have a look at the sales chart (indicates a plummeting sales graph). When you took over this account, Frog (Eric Idle character), Conquistador was a brand leader. Here you introduced your first campaign, “Conquistador Coffee brings a new meaning to the word vomit.” Here you made your special introductory offer of a free dead dog with every jar, and this followed your second campaign “the tingling fresh coffee which brings you exciting new cholera, mange, dropsy, the clap, hard pad, and athlete’s head. From the House of Conquistador.”

Yeah, I know, Bud Light’s Mulvaney campaign hasn’t been, so far, as awful for Anheuser-Busch as it was for the fictional Monty Python coffee brand. But sales of the beer continue to slide. Last week, by way of a $15 mail-in rebate, A-B started giving the beer away, because, unlike wine and hard liquor, beer has a brief shelf-life. 

So, yes, boycotts can be effective. 

But we were told by the mainstream media that boycotts don’t work.

Here a few examples of that wrongness:

Six weeks ago, ABC News’ Max Zahn and Kiara Alfonseca cautioned us about boycotts, “However, the campaigns rarely succeed in hurting a company’s sales or influencing its decision making.”

Around that same time, Patrick Coffee (no relation to Python’s Conquistador Coffee) of the Wall Street Journal, while citing other experts, opined that about the Bud Light boycott that “such campaigns often have failed to deliver a meaningful blow.” (Paid subscription might be required to access the link.)

Citing “research,” and of course falling back on “experts,” Becky Sullivan of NPR warned us “that other social media-fueled boycotts were short-lived.”

So where are the finger-waving fact-checkers? Why haven’t these articles been revised?

Meanwhile, Target is facing a boycott over its prominent promotions of “tuck-friendly,” that is, male-genitilia-hiding, swimsuits, as well as arguably promoting the trans agenda to children. It has lost $10 billion in market valuation since a boycott began against Target. 

Such a move is now called “Bud Lighting.”

This won’t be the last time that I say, when you get woke you go broke.

And it won’t be the last time I point out instances where the mainstream media was wrong.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Bud Light Limbo, How Low Can Sales Continue to Go?

Posted: May 9, 2023 by datechguy in culture
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Knight: You must choose, but choose wisely

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 1989

After some attempts to express the idea that:

  1. The Mulvaney Business wasn’t their idea
  2. They will be more careful to just talk beer in the future
  3. 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:

It didn’t:

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.

How bad is it? This bad:

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:

  1. This isn’t going to change until you get an explicit apology from Anheuser Busch
  2. The company is going to have to be willing to take the short term media hit when they do
  3. The salutary effects this is having on other companies thinking of going woke will continue
  4. 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.

Five Interesting Things I Saw at Longhorn’s while Watching the Games Under My Fedora: Orders, Defense, Sale and the Clock, Bud Light and DeSantis

Posted: May 6, 2023 by datechguy in baseball, election 2024, elections, nba, politics
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Yesterday with DaWife working and both the Celtics and Redsox playing in Philly I decided to go to Longhorn’s Restaurant to watch the game and have some of their spicy chicken bites (if you haven’t had them try them, they are the best value in terms of taste and quantity of any appetizer offered in any restaurant out there.

There were five things that jumped out at me while I sat at the bar:

First of all while the neither the restaurant nor the bar was very crowded (likely due to the games and the pending Mother’s day next week) the takeout business was very brisk. I observed the young lady running the takeout, she was doing well in a busy job. The phone was cranking and the orders were flowing. Before COVID the amount of takeout a place like this would do was minimal but even with COVID finished many people have really taken to getting their restaurant food at home without the restaurant. It’s one of the subtle ways the COVID stuff has changed us.

Second of all I was watching the Celtics Philly game and noticed that, at least for the first half Philly was contesting the initial inbounds passes after scoring even before the Celtics started pulling away. You don’t see a lot of teams doing that and it proved to be, at least in my opinion effective in giving the Celtics some grief. I think more teams should do this in the NBA, while it doesn’t allow a set defense it does and can disrupt a set offense.

Third of all I was watching the Redsox , Phillies game with great interest both because of Chris Sale for for five of the six innings he pitched looked like the Sale of 2018 constantly throwing over 95 and getting ahead of hitters but living on the edge of the pitch clock. Under the new rules the pitcher has to be in his leg kick by the time the clock hits zero or a ball is automatically called and the number of pitches he got off within a second of what would be a violation was considerable. This had some effect in his bad inning when he would get angry at himself and vent and then have to rush a pitch to keep a penalty. I’m curious how many other pitchers in baseball are living on the edge of the clock?

Of course being at the bar I naturally kept an eye on BudLight Sales. Longhorn offers two beers at a slight discount for a smaller glass, Bud Light and Miller Lite. In the two hours I was there I did not see a single Bud Light poured but in fairness I didn’t see any Miller Lite being ordered either. In fact what little there was of beer orders were of the local IPA’s but be that as it may Bud wasn’t moving. Perhaps they can start offering it at Tuppence a glass?

Finally I was REALLY caught by surprise by a political ad by a superpac during the Red Sox game. It was a powerful ad about freedom but the climax of the ad was a mother and child putting a DeSantis for president sign in their yard and a person with a Trump 2016 bumper sticker on his pickup putting a DeSantis 2024 bumper sticker over it.

I’ve not been able to find the Ad to embed it but let me tell you if Donald Trump already had his hair on fire over DeSantis as a candidate this will send him over the edge.

Frankly I’m torn between the two of them. Either would make a fine President and each has different plusses and minus.

Of course if Jay Valentine is right, it may all be moot anyways

To become president, Trump must win a bunch of swing states.  To win each state he needs more ballots in his pile than the other guy.  It’s baked into the data — which we look at every day — that Trump is not going to win those swing states.  None of them.

It’s not his fault.  He will probably get more votes, just not more ballots.

and he closes thus:

Unfortunately, the RNC is about raising dough and having elaborate meetings with mediocre minds.  The Trump campaign thinks rallies, flags, and red hats can overcome the Left’s complete control of election apparatus.

It’s like France in 1939. 

Trump is France. 

If that is correct there will be trouble and if DeSantis believes the left won’t use these tactics against him in a general then he’s a fool.

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