The battle of Bud Light
Bud Light goes heavy on the down-home charm in its new ad to mark the beginning of the National Football League (NFL) season.
The ad, which portrays the beer as a key component in football fans’ game-day rituals, is part of the brand’s efforts to re-establish itself as America’s least objectionable lager after it upset some conservative customers by making a social media ad with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney and subsequently lost its crown as the category leader.
According to System1, the ad does its job well. The company’s analysis reveals that the Easy To Sunday spot is easily identified with the brand and has ‘exceptional’ short-term sales driving potential.
Jon Evans, System1’s chief customer officer told Marketing Week that it’s the ad Bud Light ‘needed to make’ and effectively draws a line under the Mulvaney issue.
That may well be the case for consumers, but the specter of the Bud Light backlash is likely to haunt the industry for a while yet.
Marketers were blindsided by the boycott and unnerved at seeing a brand’s sales plummet precipitously like that. The most damage you could do with a single ad was supposed to be waste your budget, not tank a brand. Now, many marketers are nervous about associating their brands with progressive values because they fear losing their jobs if they get it wrong.
And in the wake of similar stories, like Target attributing some of its poor financial performance to protests against its Pride-month promotions, and companies becoming reticent about ESG, there are questions about whether the ground has shifted and whether it is still safe, let alone profitable, for brands to espouse progressive politics.
In truth, its too early for certainties. It’s only been six months since the Bud Light debacle, for example, and that’s nowhere near long enough to observe all the brand’s buyers. In the interim, though, there’s an analysis of the events that have spooked corporate America in Vox that is worth reading.
In it, Jerry Davis, a professor of management at Michigan University, makes a good point that Bud Light is vulnerable to boycotts because it might just be ‘the most maximally substitutable beverage on Earth’. But the main thrust of the piece is that conservative are not winning the war against progressivism so much as they’re just starting to win a few battles. That seems like the most sensible reading of the situation right now. What appears to have happened to Bud Light and Target is not insignificant, but it's worth remembering that it was big news precisely because it was against the run of play.
That’s no comfort to a marketer in the eye of a backlash, of course, and even the remote threat of a successful boycott changes the calculus when it's your job or your company on the line.
If it's practical advice you're after, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam marketing professor Peeter Verlegh has compiled the findings of several studies of brand activism into a paper, which you can read for free here.
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