Anheuser-Busch Inbev said Tuesday that revenue growth in most of its global regions was offset by a drop in North American sales, in a sign of continuing fallout from a promotion with a transgender influencer that cost it sales.
The world’s largest brewer and parent company of Bud Light said adjusted earnings for the latest quarter rose 4.1% to $5.4 billion on revenues that climbed 5% to $15.6 billion.
Revenue in the United States for the July-September period, however, tumbled 13.5%. AB InBev, based in Leuven, Belgium, noted that sales to retailers were down “primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light.”
Bud Light sales plunged amid a conservative backlash after the brand sent a commemorative can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in early April.
ITT: “Bud Light is bad”
So are all of the top-selling beers in the world, and especially in America (which is the subject of this article).
We get it. You’re into craft beer that costs $20/pint. I like them on occasion myself. But when I want to get drunk on beer cheaply, I’m not going to my local brewery. I’m not even going to Great Lakes or Same Adams. I’m going for a cheap, light, mass-produced pilsner. PBR, Coors, Miller Lite, Bud Light, Youngling, etc. They’re all the same cheap swill.
It’s the same with everything. The average person who isn’t an enthusiast consumes tons of mediocre junk. Taylor Swift is probably a good analog for music: I don’t see a lot of academic musicians analyzing the new music theory she’s implementing, or literary analysts dissecting her lyrics. Marvel Movies are getting famous for being pretty much the same heroes journey with rushed CGI every 6 months or so. Tons of people still watch shows like Friends, the Office, and Seinfeld. McDonald still sells billions of burgers in spite of the existence of high-end restaurants.
And that’s okay. Not everything. You consume needs to be some ultra-expensive artisanal elitist product.
As for Bud Light in particular, this is a a great example of a bad PR team. Either stick to your guns or don’t enter the fight in the first place. The fact that they’ve backed down and caved to transphobes means they’re much lower on my list now.
Excellent take, but in defense of the AB PR team, I don’t think they were expecting so much backlash from giving a 6 pack of beer to a trans person. I think it was just a small promotion they were doing and they were not anticipating this blowing up into something big. Right wing Twitter caught wind of it and made it a much bigger deal than it was.
They did something very triggering to a group of people that are extremely easily triggered. To a normal person it seems like no big deal on the surface. From a business stand point, it makes zero sense to promote your product to people who don’t like it, while triggering a huge chunk of your faithful patrons.
Might be called the Butterfly effect, idk, but the token move definitely brewed up a blizzard of conservative snowflakes.
But if you’re trying to get drunk as fast as you can for as cheap as possible without any regard for taste, there are are products out there that have higher alcohol content and cost less than all of those products you named. Wouldn’t that be a more efficient means to an end?
Yeah it really was a shit thing to back down on it. The right won’t buy their beer anymore because Busch tried to support trans people
But now the left won’t buy it because they lack conviction to stick to their word.
As you said, they shouldn’t have entered the arena, or stuck to their imagery now that they’re associated with it (for better or worse). Now they’re paying the price of being a bunch of wet-noodles.
Heineken gets a lot of flak (at least in France) but imo it’s the best beer in the “almost too diluted to pass as actual beer” category
heineken light is also impressively satisfying for a lower calorie beer, gotta say
So, I hear you enjoy golden showers
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I had similar problems with Target when they just immediately decided to just cave