| Marketing in the News | James Cox |
The Bud Light Boycott
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The Issue that I chose to analyze in this post comes from a Vox article about the recent Bud Light promotion. If you are not familiar with this promotion it involves a transgender women named Dylan Mulvaney. The controversy started when Mulvaney was featured on a can of Bud Light as their latest promotion. Fans were outraged at this and began a boycott of Bud Light and other Budweiser company products. Various celebrities and other influencers are boycotting these products, as well as certain bars and restaurants who have stopped selling Budweiser products. While you may think that this is a death sentence for Budweiser, many store owners say that this trend will not last. One store owner said that he has seen maybe a 20 percent drop off in Bud Light sales, with many customers opting for other light beers. This is very minuscule in the big picture of things.
Now, the value proposition of Budweiser products has always been a cheap affordable beer that appeals to the blue collar people of America. This being said we can assume that a lot of Budweiser's target market is white republican Americans, since these are usually the blue collar workers in America. This class of people have very strict views on social issues in America, the transgender debate being one of them. Taking this all into account, it was a strange move for Budweiser to release a promotion like this, that would so oppose its target markets views. Now of course there is nothing wrong with putting a transgendered person on a can of beer in my eyes, but many people see this another way.Some see this as the media and companies wanting to push this new era agenda on people who are reluctant to accept this change. While I don't disagree that pushing views on people who don't accept them is wrong, I don't believe that Budweiser did anything inherently wrong. I think the challenge that Budweiser is facing now, is the clean up from this and the challenge of convincing their target market to stay loyal to them. Overall I learned a lot of things from this article. I learned that it's important to take into account the beliefs of your target market, instead of following trends in the world at that time. I learned that people are very unaccepting of other people's beliefs, even though it has no direct affect on their lives. Finally I learned that old and well established companies can still get into trouble, especially in today's market.
I think that Budweiser has the right idea in that we should support all people no matter their identity, but in order to save their business, they should have gone about it in a different way. If i were in the situation where i had to decide how to advertise our support, I would have maybe donated to an organization that helped transgenders. All in all, this issue doesn't really affect me, because I am more of a Coors Banquet guy, but it is definitely an interesting marketing issue that I think a lot of companies can learn from.
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