The implosion of Bud Light continues, and at this point, I think it has to be considered a historic success of a boycott.
As I last reported, it’s hit them right where it’s going to hurt the people behind the bad decisions the most — with the loss of jobs in their corporate offices. They’re “restructuring” to eliminate “corporate and marketing roles at major U.S. offices, including St. Louis, New York and Los Angeles” because of the losses they’ve taken. Reports estimated that would amount to cutting about 360 people. It wouldn’t involve the frontline workers, brewers, or drivers.
On top of that, Bud Light just took another sales plunge. So it’s still going down, even after all this time, since the damaging trend started in April after they linked up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
The Anheuser-Busch brand saw sales plummet 26.8% during the week ended July 22 — slightly worse than Bud Light’s previous week’s decline of 26.1%, according to data from NielsenIQ and Bump Williams Consulting. [….]
Meanwhile, sales of the No. 2 beer in the US, Modelo Especial, popped 13.4% over the same period, according to the data.
Now that’s some kind of staying power for a boycott. It’s also easy, because there are so many options to choose from, without a lot of effort, including Modelo Especial, which knocked Bud Light out of the number one selling beer slot two months ago, it’s also about to capture the market share, according to Bump Williams. They expect that to happen before the end of August.
“It’s going to happen a LOT sooner than anyone had ever thought,” Williams told The Post on Monday. “We have it surpassing Bud Light mid-August.”
Modelo Especial has reached 8.2% market share year to date, compared with Bud Light’s 8.4% — “the closest any brand has come to surpassing Bud Light as the King of Beers,” Williams said.
We’ve reported before about the distributors being upset over this. Some thought that it was going to last six months, and some thought it might be permanent.
Now the latest word is that many have resigned themselves to the fact that this could be permanent — that some of the customers are gone, and they’re just not going to come back after the horrible move with Mulvaney.
Many Anheuser-Busch distributors say they are resigned to their painful Bud Light losses — and that they have given up on luring back disaffected customers following the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, The Post has learned.
After four months of hiring freezes and layoffs — with some beer truck drivers getting heckled and harassed even as Bud Light sales have dropped by more than 25% — Anheuser-Busch wholesalers have accepted that they have lost a chunk of their customers for good — and need to focus on a new crop of drinkers.
“Consumers have made a choice,” said an executive at a Texas-based beer distributor who did not want to be identified. “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.” [….]
“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.
So now, even more of them are getting that this isn’t going away, and being with Bud Light is being up a creek without a paddle.
Add that to the “Death Star” from Costco, and it looks like we can say — with a lot of evidence to support it — that Bud Light destroyed their brand with their effort to be woke, as well as their failure to step back from it and apologize.
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