Great write up. I’m in a consulting/strategist role for large enterprises and believe the go-forward picture ought to be reverting to prior channels and tactics, pandering harder to their core market at this time, and ignoring the current fiasco otherwise.
They’re too big to fail with exclusive or at least limited distribution and sales contracts and will survive temporary dips in sales. So will their distributors.
A few campaigns of a traditional family man drinking a bud light with an American flag visible while he grills hotdogs, or some dude painted in team colors getting funnily smacked in the face with a foul ball he failed to catch and they’ll be right back on track. It might not hurt to publicly sponsor Wounded Warriors or something military too.
They should definitely avoid hiring progressive feminists who hate their core buyers and want to challenge their proven market flow vs amplifying it in the future.
It doesn’t give me the who, but people indeed did vote for it. Whether or not they were being sincere or a smart ass, I do not know.
Hey, 13% voted for ‘everybody hating my guts and for me to finally go away’. Which I most definitely will at some point, I am not immune to death, of course. But it’s nice that anyone pays enough attention to me, to hate me that much. Sort of a compliment, really. They have to pay attention to you to hate you. I know who at least one of the 13% is…
It was a good write up. Well thought out ideas well explained, though I sort of disagree with the prescriptions.
The only thing Bud needs to do to save their brand, their business, end the boycott and make business as good as perhaps even much better than before is to utter two simple little words “We’re sorry”, being specific about what they are sorry for and all this would go away. If they wrote a simple public letter like below, this would be over. "Dear America,
We’re sorry we also tried to ram trans ideology down your throat using a guy LARPing as a tranny. We didn’t know you had more than enough of this shit rammed down your throat and as a result, we apologize. We were not looking to piss anybody off, we just made a miscalculation on how best to grow and bring appeal to this brand for future generations. We made a terrible mistake and we are taking steps to avoid making these same mistakes going forward. For instance, we will not make marketing campaigns that involve politics or political hot button issues. We will continue to investigate where we can be better.
blah, blah blah,
Sincerely,
AB"
A public letter like this, would be all it would take and not only would the boycott would be over, but many people have pledged to buy cases of the beer even if they do not drink, that is how much this apology would mean.
And the reason we will not see Budweiser do this very simple thing is because they are afraid of left-wing violence and a government that allows this left-wing violence to continue unabated. Not just unabated, but even encouraged. They are too scared to apologize. I am certain they could have come up with the same idea, but while regular people may merely boycott, but if they piss-off the left, they will cause actual violence against the company. They will dox all the brass who made the decision to apologize and show up outside their homes, threaten their families, lock them out of their banking institutions and perhaps even have them arrested for “hate speech”. That’s what AB is afraid of. They are not too proud to admit a mistake, they are too afraid of the left, to apologize for doing a leftist thing that hurt their business.
There is tremendous evil afoot, this is just a symptom. It will continue to get worse…
Oh and when somebody is dismissive and utters the word “It’s just __________”. They participate in the evil that is the left.
It’s not a problem of evil winning, it never does. It’s not about good ultimately winning, it always has, in the end. It’s about how far will we descend and how bad will it get by the time evil finally loses. Will there be anything worse saving?
I wouldn’t necessarily contribute this all to woke stuff though (although I don’t think that has helped them). Their content is not what it used to be IMO. They are mostly making sequels it seems. Even the few very popular franchises like Frozen aren’t going to make the movie and merchandise revenue off a sequel that they will of the original (in most cases). They have been mostly missing with Star Wars. With their amusement parks, they have gotten greedy IMO. IIRC, it’s around $150 a ticket, parking is $25-50, food is expensive for crap. I’d just feel like I was bent over a barrel if I had to go for a family trip. I don’t understand the adults who go on their own. I would pay not to go haha. It sounds like a nightmare to me. I’ll probably end up going if I have kids, and I’ll have to pretend to enjoy it (probably what my dad did when we went, I loved it at 8 years old though, so there is that).
Nah. The boomerang would put them in a constant state of pandering and this is how cancel culture wins.
Ignore the smaller voice until it dies off, feed your market and in a year or two nobody will remember.
But leftists will if you “marginalize” them, and they’ll keep it front center as a hill to die on, reminding everyone else too. And Bud Light will never be able to move on if they become part of the “give me Liberty” slogan of the far left.
Take the temporary lumps (still showing overall profit) and move forward with a very basic lesson learned/remembered in knowing your market.
I’m not suggesting they’re doing the right thing morally in either case. It’s a beer business. They sell beer and should stick to that, by marketing to their base. And questions of morality are exactly what they need to unwind themselves from, not get entangled with even further.
Good call. It reminds me of when the NFL went woke. I don’t need to be thinking a whole lot when I’m relaxing on a Sunday. Thats the opposite of my intention. I just want to zone out and watch dudes get their ribcages knocked off their spines.
Same when I drank. I wanted to forget about the world, not engage in some greater social cause or become more enriched by a deeper understanding of girls with dicks.
Of course you wouldn’t. It just happened magically as they double down on kiddie diddling and sexualizing our kids, publicly. Total coincidence.
Though the piss poor content does not help. But why is the content piss poor? Because it’s woke. Nobody can make a joke… well no one can make a funny joke. Woke reality doesn’t square with nature and humanity so all you can do is put together shoddy ideas intended to be as unoffensive as possible, while singling out majority groups due to immutable characteristics.
Hell, what if I offered you millions of dollars to make a show for Disney with the following rules:
It cannot even remotely, tacitly or even accidently cause a minority person any discomfort whatsoever.
It has to openly support the LGBTQIA++++++ community.
No signs of affection can be shown unless it represents a sexually deviant act or person.
All the characters have to represent “oppressed groups”
Men have to be represented as weak, stupid morons.
White people in general either have to be evil or stupid.
Try making a decent show with a story line that’s interesting and where there is good character development, under those conditions. Yeah, it would be crap. Don’t worry anything that mandates such representation in a show cannot help but to be crap. Even if you scratch one or two of the criteria out, it’s still impossible. Hell, it was hard when you had carte blanche and the only thing you had to worry about was cuss words.
New shows suck.
New music is horrible
New movies, hell I am not even a little curious what’s in the theaters now. I am certain it’s all woke shit that I don’t want to see.
I am so sick of woke shit, woke people and woke stupidity. Can we quit pretending it’s not stupid and there is nothing about that ideology that will benefit you by ingesting it. The ideology along with it’s adherents are doomed to failure.
You can only lie for so long.
You can only go against nature for so long.
You can only deny reality for so long.
How long is long? I don’t know, but it’s fixed. Fads fade. The fad part of wokeness is (finally) starting to fade.
Yeah. Point being it’s a two way street though. Nobody wants the Jehovas Witnesses pushing beer either.
If Bud wanted to be smart they would just have neutral commercials. Then chicks with dicks who happen to like Bud Light would buy it and so would the people who don’t like chicks with dicks.
That movie had diversity. It was great. It wasn’t heavy handed, which differentiates it from most of the movies that people complain about in regards to diversity. It wasn’t a major plot line that a character was not white, a woman or LGBTQ. The way the characters interacted seemed believable, because that’s how most people interact.
I find forced diversity in film to be very cringe-worthy. Top Gun Maverick was very much a throw-back to the basic and wholesome concept of making entertaining and exciting artwork that most people find enjoyable.
Tom Cruise imo added years of quality life to Val Kilmer by putting him in the movie; I was amazed at how good Kilmer looked (and all the weight he lost).
I heard is was good and was an exception to otherwise a lousy selection of dreary woke-ass movies. Parts I saw of it, were decent. A cast doesn’t have to be monolithic, nor does it have to be diverse. It merely has to be well done. If you are not thinking about the character’s race, color, sexuality or national origin, then the movie is more likely good. If you are ramrodding tropes into story telling, it makes it suck.
Here are all the beers that AB-Inbev sell, so if you care here is the list:
Aguilla Original, Becks, Brahma, Budweiser, Bud Light, Cass Fresh, Castle Lager, Harbin, Jupilter, Leffe, Michelob brands, Modelo, Quilmes,Skol, Stella Artios
