It’s been four months since the boycott began against Bud Light over its partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, and many distributors are losing hope that customers will ever come back.
“Consumers have made a choice,” said an executive at a Texas-based beer distributor, reports the New York Post. “They have left [Bud Light] and that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t envision a big percentage of them coming back.”
Plus, the former customers who switched to drinking a Bud Light competitor during the boycott have likely found beers like Coors Light and Miller Lite “are a very similar product.”
The executive noted that success ultimately comes down to “whoever is best at marketing.”
“There is an increasing feeling that this [Bud Light] decline rate could last for a while and the distributors are worried about losing those drinkers to other similar brands,” David Steinmann, executive editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights, told The Post. […]
“The strategy of targeting younger, newer consumers is the right one,” Michael Stone, chairman of Beanstalk Group, a New York-based branding firm, told The Post. “But Anheuser-Busch made a mistake executing on the strategy.”
One silver lining for beleaguered Anheuser-Busch distributors is the rise of Modelo Especial — the No. 2 beer brand, which Anheuser-Busch owns outside of the US.
Rival Constellation Brands distributes Modelo in the US, where it has been outselling Bud Light on a weekly basis since May.
“What’s helping distributors is having Modelo in their portfolio,” the beer executive said. “But if you don’t have Constellation, you are in a pickle.”
While Bud Light remains the No. 1 beer brand in the US, those days are likely numbered, with Modelo expected to overtake it by the end of August, experts say. (New York Post)
The boycott against Bud Light began April 1, when Mulvaney announced the collaboration on social media, presenting a custom Bud Light can featuring his face on it to celebrate what he alleged to be "365 days of girlhood." Mulvaney also posted another video of himself in the bath drinking a Bud Light.
Blowback was swift, leading to double digit dips in sales in the months that followed. Last week, parent company Anheuser-Busch announced hundreds of layoffs.