No...
Rightwingers started making a bunch of noise. And AB immediately caved to them. Making the vast majority of everyone else not want to buy their products either.
If they stayed on course the drop probably wouldn't happen. Instead they managed to piss of the majority of Americans on both sides.
I wonder what percentage of people who would be put off by Budweiser caving to bigots so quickly would actually regularly drink Budweiser in the first place?
Have you seen the way those hipsters guzzle PBR? Do you really think it tastes any better than Budweiser? Image is EVERYTHING when you're selling cheap beer. Budweiser could have cemented its place as a progressive all-inclusive all-american beer. Instead they gave in to the bullies, an act that no bully can respect.
PBR has a very distinct flavor. Its not great but its fine.
The best thing about a PBR is, if you don't finish it.... oh well
Selling hipsters on a basically dead beer like PBR would be easier than getting them to drink the most mainstream of beers.
The people who drink Budweiser and Bud Light are the people who buy cheap beer. Whether it's at a bar or stocking up for a party, it's like buying chips or pizza, you aren't thinking too hard about it. Miller or Busch or PBR or Coors or Old Style or Michelob or any other roughly equivalent beer (half of which are also owned by AB) works just as well. Budweiser gave people a reason to think about their beer, and didn't give anyone a reason to think positively about their beer. If you are looking at the available options, and one of them is associated with bigotry, you're going to pick anything else.
A vanishingly small percentage. The kind of people that care about inclusivity and LGBTQ+ rights aren't the kind of people that drink Budweiser. Their core demographic skews very heavily to the dude bro side of things. They pissed off a significant chunk of their existing customers, and then by immediately backtracking lost any potential new customers they might have picked up. They basically made the worst possible set of decisions they could have.
The kind of people that care about inclusivity and LGBTQ+ rights aren’t the kind of people that drink Budweiser
It's so weird that people actually think this is true.
Bud Light sells at gay bars the same as any other beer lol
Gay people are just normal people.
Worst part was they hung Dylan out to dry. She didn’t ask for the partnership, they wanted to use her for her demo. Then, when bigots started losing their minds, they threw her under the bus. They offered zero guidance or support of any kind. After unleashing the hate and vitriol of assholes across the country, silence. Fuck everyone involved at InBev.
Note that they still gained revenue. The idiots not buying Bud Light just bought another of the bajillion beers AB Inbev owns.
And not just gained revenue, but 5.4 god damn billion dollars. "Hurting" my ass. They can give me some of that so they can keep milking this bs
Everyone that got pissed off about that tried other stuff and found out it was actually better.
Also, a lot of dumbasses probably went to the store and bought a different product... made by the same company.
Hang out at a gas station in the south a lot...
Lot of dumbasses buying Budweiser hoping that Budlight goes bankrupt because of their decision to get something else.
Might as well be trying to bankrupt Coke by buying Diet Coke.
Haha came here thinking the same thing. I actually liked their endorsement for that trans person but I'd never switch to fuckin bud lite. Ew.
People should be boycotting bud light because it's awful not because of their ad.
What I don't get is all the people pointing out Bud Light doesn't taste good like it's a recent discover or new change...
Like, do you all really think people are out their drinking shitty light beer because they like the taste?
They're drinking it because it's cheap and they can drink a case a day by themselves.
Hell, back in college if someone showed up with Budweiser, they got shit for wasting money on "expensive" beer. Normally everyone just bought whatever was the cheapest option, because how it tasted was the absolute lowest priority when getting enough booze for 50-100 broke college kids to binge drink.
I didn't understand that campaign... Bud Light has always been the wilfully shitty and boring beer that appeals to (and I'm trying to be diplomatic here... ) blue collar types or those that don't really have a discerning palate.
Millennials and Zoomers by and large don't drink that much beer. Gender neutral/accepting club kids don't drink beer. If they're drinking anything, it's likely cocktails or white claw. In the odd event they went for beer it would be something quirky or higher quality than Bud fucking Light. Presumably Bud was trying to appeal to that crowd since their chief demographic is stagnant, but Bud Light was silly to not go after a group adjacent to their core audience but instead court a fickle segment of the population who doesn't give half a fuck about what they're selling and moreover is full on HATED by who already consumed their beer. Bud has decades of cultural weight about being a conservative, blue collar beer... that matters for better or worse
For the record: I'm glad a brand like Bud (who I have zero love for) made overtures to the trans community... even if it was crass commercialization. From a purely capitalist perspective, it made zero sense for a brand like Bud. What's worse, due to Bud's misstep, bigots now feel emboldened and other brands might make the decision to not be inclusive after watching this play out
Trans allies (and open minded folks in general) by and large moved on from tasteless American adjunct lagers a decade ago and drink completely different beer. Bud is a relic. Trying to give it a hurried makeover won't suddenly make it cool. Jumping into the culture war fray and folding the instant bigots complained just fucked things up Bud's appeal for anyone whose attention they had
Conservatism is a plague of oppression. If you are not with them, you are against them.
The disease of conservatism is long overdue for a cure. Do your part by teaching your children why it is inappropriate to keep relationships with conservatives
My mom drinks bud light because she can drink all day and still use power tools with relative safety.
It's just water. I don't see what the big deal is. 🤷🏻♂️
InBev is anus and their generic beers are mostly horrible. People should have already been boycotting them long ago for being a soulless international conglomerate.
Chances are there is a local or regional brew that corresponds to whatever mass market swill they produce, and people should drink those small local brewery offerings instead.
No no, tasting like piss is not the issue here. They never once complained about drinking the worst made beer ever.
Clearly the issue was someone once gave 6 beers to someone they don’t like.
I mean, once that person posted on social media… well bigotry requires that they must shout about people “shoving this issues down my throat” and act like an asshole.
I mean that person who got 6 free beers posted a fucking picture about in the internet… can you believe that? From now on you gotta buy piss from someone else. I bet they’re not “woke” in South Africa…
/s
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.
Really doubt it was because of this one incident, conservatives just sensationalize anything to do with trans people. Like...
Budwieser is a trash product. Everyone knows it. Anybody with taste buds who wants to drink will grab anything else.
But ofc it makes business sense to blame it on us trans people, like this was anything, like Budweiser ever did shit for us in the first place...
Iirc they backed a trans influencer drawing conservative outrage, then, after realizing that the conservatives were a large part of their customer base, they did a 180 and publicly cut ties with the influencer thereby also alienating the customers they hoped to gain in the first place while also not gaining back much of their conservative customers.
Someone feel free to fact check me I'm drawing on memory here.
Eh you are forgetting the spot where the conservative snowflakes also just started buying different beer from anheuser-busch because they don't know how companies are structured and thought bud light was a whole company. They haven't lost money here just the share of money coming from bud light in north America has shifted to other beers they own.
But ofc it makes business sense to blame it on us trans people, like this was anything, like Budweiser ever did shit for us in the first place...
You realize it's just more rage bait right? The parent company here complaining has seen increased growth in subsidiaries like Corona because the lot getting bent out of shape over bud light just bought other bear made by the same parent company. They didn't lose money it's just coming from different beers now. Fuck the wall street noise here
...So... it's making billions instead of billions? My God...
I think it's more related to the total lack of spine on their part, and their willingness to sell out one market in order to appease another.
They could have had a market for life. Just ask Subaru.
I'm only familiar with the "controversy" from the headlines, but I don't quite understand what pissed off the conservatives so much. Budweiser just sent this person a custom-branded 6-pack or something, right?
Every company sells their product to people from all walks of life, it's just not always publicized. The fact that they choose to rage against Budweiser of all brands is just ridiculous to me. Now if they were complaining about the quality of the beer, that I might understand.
Rightwing influencers need content just like every other influencer. They found out about the promotion and then went to work making the videos that would drive their audiences absolutely insane over this nonsense.
They posted about trans issues and removed it so the conservatives think they support it and the trans people think they're liars (they are). They kind of get the worse of both worlds now, if they stuck with supporting trans rights, they could've at least retained the lgbt+ market
I mean they pissed off the only people willing to drink their dog shit excuse for alcohol.
They are not even trying. All their tv commercials are now for Modello. Same company.
Yeah, this is one of those cases of not knowing your own market. While what they did was laudable in a general sense, they should have also realized their core demographic is heavily conservative and that such a move was highly likely to hurt them far more than it would benefit them.
Bud in general and Bud Light in particular is just the worst kind of swill. It's only redeeming quality is being cheap.
Why are "conservatives" so weak willed, and need to belong to a team?
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