Bud Light sales decline proof brands need to know their audience before going woke

It may be hard to believe now, but the Budweiser marketing officials who reached out to trans social-media influencer Dylan Mulvaney probably thought they had a winner.

Woke does sell — sometimes.

Nike’s ad featuring the controversial one-knee icon Colin Kaepernick was a killer — sales of the sneakers soared in its aftermath.

And when it doesn’t?

Well, just days after the American public was subjected to the spectacle of a trans woman in a bubble bath sipping a beer, the stock of Budweiser’s parent, Anhueser-Busch, recovered from its initial nose dive as if nothing had happened.

No harm, no foul.

But something did happen, and it isn’t good for Bud.

According to the latest sales figures, beer drinkers (like many Americans) are a pretty conservative bunch and they’re running away from Bud faster than Joe Biden from reporters.

Data from the beer industry’s info guru, Beer Marketer’s Insights, shows that the decline in sales for Bud Light — the beer Mulvaney was sipping semi-nude in the bathtub — is accelerating, down 17% nationwide through the week ending April 15.

Bud Light continues to lose market share to competitors now three weeks in from the airing of the Mulvaney ad.

Bud was the brainchild of the famed beer maker Adolphus Busch, and his St. Louis-based company Anheuser-Busch.

It was created nearly two-centuries ago and came to symbolize American values through its iconic commercials like the Clydesdales.

About 15 years ago, a Belgian-Brazilian outfit InBev snapped it up with the assistance of a private equity firm known as 3G, and that’s about where you can trace Bud’s decline.

It’s now a company whose plumbing has been decimated by cost cutting by these newish owners with fading brands they have failed to support and modernize.

Beer wholesalers tell me management’s main concern was never about looking for creative ways to keep Bud’s loyal customers while appealing to millennials and Gen-Zers.

It’s about cutting costs to meet earnings targets, which is why no one appeared too concerned about the Dylan Mulvaney spot, featured on buzz-generating social media, until it went viral.

It would be one thing if this balance sheet obsession worked, but it’s failed miserably. AB’s gross profits have slid from $33 billion in 2018 to $31 billion in 2022, and that’s even with what I am told is the manic cost cutting imposed by the company’s private equity owners.

Its shares dropped more than 30% during that five-year period.

And it’s likely to get worse from here. Yes I know, AB put on leave some of its marketing geniuses who were presumably behind the Mulvaney catastrophe. And the new crew is running some throw-back TV ads with horses, American flags and sweeping landscapes of the heartland.

But the hole that management dug itself into by ignoring a product that needed to be fed and nourished looks insurmountable now because the geniuses there misread their audience and maybe the shifting attitudes of the American consumer.

Yes, Nike had success with Kaepernick, but consider that Nike’s “brand” was counterculture to start. That ad also came out in 2018, foreshadowing the expansion of wokeism throughout the culture, in entertainment, sports and advertising.

There’s a good case to be made that the American public have had enough of the proselytizing.

Nike succeeded, but NFL attendance and TV ratings sank after the Kaepernick one-knee stunt during the National Anthem. It recovered when the owners told the players to knock it off.

Disney realized same-sex kissing scenes in movies are a hard sell to most Americans. I can make a good case that its declining profits while it picked losing battles with the Florida governor over a law that prevents schools from teaching sex to toddlers contributed to its brand taint and its latest string of cost cutting layoffs, just announced on Monday.

The lesson here is: Know your audience. When you preach to them rather than reach out to them, they don’t always forgive — or forget.