Ten million people can’t be wrong – or can they?
Say, for example, you begin with After Eight.
The next player might suggest After Eight Shots, the next After Eight Fruit Jellies, and so on until, inspiration exhausted, someone comes up with a complete misfit, say After Eight Chewing Gum, upon which there would be a loud chorus of Brandicide!!!
Those heady days are long behind us but Budweiser, the US beer giant, seemed to have reached that point recently when it produced a can of Bud Light featuring the face of Dylan Mulvaney, the trans-activist and social media influencer, promoting the beer to her 10 million followers.
You can see the wheels turning (and cans popping) in the heads of Budweiser’s marketing team: huge exposure, a broader, younger demographic and a chance to tap into the zeitgeist – a heady brew for a supposedly declining brand.
A heady brew indeed. Although ‘knock-out’ might be more appropriate given the negative reception it got from most Bud drinkers and the right-wing press.
It’s ironic that in seeking to be inclusive, Bud seemed to exclude their core customer base: male, blue-collar workers who think ‘woke’ means coming to after a night of over consumption.
Kid Rock, a celebrity Bud Light fan (make that ‘was’) posted a video of himself shooting up a case of Bud with his rifle – part of grass roots backlash campaign calling for a boycott of the product.
Bud’s experience highlights a classic marketing error: favouring prospects over loyal, established customers. Reach out to new audiences but don’t neglect – or worse – repel existing ones through your actions.
At the root of Bud’s problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of brand marketing, or it might just be greed clouding good judgment, but still remarkable in a brand of their standing.
It smacks of a knee jerk reaction from a marketing team (since suspended from work) who’s only experience of the product they’re promoting will have been in their expensive college frat room.
You must know what your values are and what are the values of the customers you are trying to reach. A brand can take years to build and days to wreck. To the consumer it is more than a product. It is an endorsement of their values and lifestyle. You are there to fulfill their aspirations, not vice versa.
The good news is that, even though fuelled massively by the right-wing press in the USA and beyond, boycotts tend to be short-lived and don’t tend to have a long-term effect.
People may be willing to change their behaviour for a few weeks, but it’s really hard to change their long-term behaviour. This coupled with a very real problem in finding an alternative product (Anheuser-Busch sells more than 100 brands of beer in the US) means that there is a real chance that this will blow over in the wider corporate sense at least, probably in a matter of weeks.
The annoying thing is that this sort of approach to widen the audience could have worked well, and maybe still can if handled better. A significant percentage of Gen Z identify as LBGTQ compared to the baby boomer generation for example; I’ve seen figures of up to 15 per cent according to some research.
But, at the very least, Bud Light should have anticipated some kind of a backlash, had a plan in place to handle it, and been able to move forward with confident and clear messaging.
According to its CEO, the company is now restructuring its marketing teams so that they can be “more closely connected to every aspect of our brands.”
I think that’s CEO speak for “understand our customers” and the company is tripling its media spend behind Bud Light this summer. Which is probably all it had to do in the first place!
Talking of knee jerks, Bud has acknowledged this cock-up with the launch of a new campaign that it hopes will reassert its manliness. It features a classic Clydesdale galloping through all American landscapes with men grabbing a couple of cold ones together. Think Marlboro cowboy country. A cliché it maybe but sometimes being right is more important than being clever.
