Go woke, go broke. .Anheuser-Busch is not going to go broke because of the Dylan Mulvaney marketing debacle, but they are taking a lot of pointless, self-inflicted damage to one of their biggest beer brands over it. .Brand loyalty in the beer world is everything. People have preferred beers and they tend to stick with them. Often for a lifetime. It takes decades or even generations of marketing to build a loyal consumer base as large as the one Budweiser had acquired. They knew their market and they targeted it..Posters with the Budweiser girls not only graced the walls of millions of young men in the 1980s, they actually led to a fashion trend and return of the one-piece bathing suit for women when bikinis had been dominant. Budweiser targeted rodeos, Nascar races and football games with their marketing. Their brand was embraced by millions of North Americans so loyal, they would walk out of a bar if it didn't carry it. I know this as I once owned a rural pub and faced a backlash when I took Bud Lite off my draft beer taps in favour of local craft brands. People got outright upset with me. .Budweiser had a loyal customer base that was the envy of the beer world. .Then, for some idiotic reason they pivoted and took on the transgendered, social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador. .The backlash from Budweiser loyalists was swift and unforgiving. .It wasn't just that Mulvaney is transgendered. She presents as a bizarre, caricature of a woman. Her videos are odd and bizarre to the point where she speaks of wanting to menstruate. It is the trans version of wearing blackface. She isn't honouring women. She presents as a mockery of them. .It is an odd thing but one that should be recognized by brand marketers; many beer consumers consider their preferred beer brand as part of their identity and they didn't want to be identified with somebody like Dylan Mulvaney. .It takes generations to build such a huge national brand but it only takes one stupid marketing error to drive millions away from it. I took a marketing course at SAIT many years ago and I remember the first lesson. There is no customer harder to win than one who has had a negative experience with your brand. .I haven't had a drink in years, but I do remember beer flavours. I know some folks would fight me to the death claiming otherwise, but the taste difference between Coors Light and Bud Light is negligible at best. They are both, terrible beers. Because of that similarity though, it makes the transition from Budweiser products to Coors products all the easier for consumers and many won't be going back. .Budweiser is madly scrambling to do damage control as they flood the airwaves with their traditional Clydesdale horse commercials loaded with imagery of working men but the horse has already left the barn. .Alissa Heinerscheid was the woke marketing luminary who came up with the notion to link Mulvaney to the brand and she has suddenly and not surprisingly taken a "leave of absence" from her role as VP of marketing with Budweiser. She was the mastermind of the worst major brand marketing error since the New Coke disaster of the 1980s. She will be lucky to find a marketing position for a lemonade stand after this disaster. She needs to rebrand herself and she has proven to be rather poor with rebranding. .The losses garnered by this marketing disaster are adding up to billions of dollars. It is doubtful that Budweiser gained new customers by any measure with their venture into trans-pandering. .Companies, like people have the right to be stupid. It doesn't mean they have to exercise that right though. .Companies need to remember to stick to their mandate of selling products and maximizing returns for investors. They need to leave the social justice agenda at the door. .Most consumers couldn't care less about the social stances held or promoted by companies selling them products. They just want good prices and good quality. .Let's hope other companies were watching closely as Budweiser shot itself in the foot. It would be refreshing to see more marketing being focused on company products and departing from social justice virtue signaling.
