The boycott against Bud Light for their partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney is now plunging other flagship Anheuser-Busch brands into the red while sales of Bud Light see double-digit declines in every region of the country.
According to new sales figures obtained by the Daily Mail, the parent company is seeing declines across its brands. This comes after HSBC downgraded BUD stock from “BUY” to “HOLD”, according to a note by HSBC beverage sector Managing Director Carlos Laboy first reported by CNBC.
Laboy cited the “unprecedented” gross incompetence of the Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev leadership, accusing them of “alienating the core base of the firm’s largest brand”.
Bud Light volumes sold were down 21.4% for the month of April and volumes for all Anheuser-Busch brands were down more than 12%. This follows a report of Bud Light volumes crashing 26% in the last week of April.
Budweiser was down 11.5%, Natural Light was down 6% and Busch was down 5.3% for the month of April. Meanwhile competing beers were reaping massive sales gains: Coors Light was up 10.9%, Miller Light was up 14.7%, Coors was up 20.5% and Yeungling – America’s oldest brewery – was up 14.7%.
The Daily Mail’s numbers also show that Bud Light sales are “plunging” by double digits in every region of the United States. Bud Light sales are down 18% in the Pacific region (which includes Hawaii and Alaska), 29% in the Mountain region, 25% in West North Central, 22% in West South Central, 25% in East South Central, 23.5% in East North Central, 19% in the Mid-Atlantic, 25% in the South Atlantic, and 14% in New England.
Dylan Mulvaney made a video urging fans to “normalize the bulge”, because Mulvaney’s crotch “doesn’t look like little Barbie pocket”. (Dylan Mulvaney/Instagram)
These numbers are a drastic departure from those quoted by Anheuser-Busch Inbev, the parent company of Anheuser-Busch, CEO Michel Doukeris, who assured investors on a call last week that all Bud Light losses in April represented just 1% of sales for the 500 AB InBev brands worldwide. In that call, Doukeris blamed conservatives for spreading “misinformation” about the company’s partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. Ironically, his statement itself was misinformation, because it claimed that Bud Light only sponsored one Instagram post by the pro-child-sex-change trans star, when it had in fact sponsored two.
The latest communication from AB InBev was a letter to retailers obtained by Daily Mail which blamed an “an outside agency without Anheuser-Busch management awareness or approval”. The letter also said that the lack of management oversight that had allowed a rogue agency to wreck the world’s best-selling beer brand has been “addressed” and announced the replacement of the VP of Bud Light Marketing.
This followed a non-apology by Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth in mid-April, who invoked his past service as a Marine veteran and CIA Agent to emphasize the importance of American values like “accountability”. His statement did not actually take responsibility for the Mulvaney fiasco, though.
Mulvaney’s first post for Bud Light as a marketing partner featured the trans star with a five-o’clock shado0w in a bubble bath. (Dylan Mulvaney/Instagram)
On Monday, the marketing guru behind Budweiser’s most iconic and successful ads – Robert Lachky – blasted his former company in an interview with the Saint Louis Dispatch.
“It’s a complete lack of corporate oversight, and it’s been that way since (InBev) took the company over,” he said. “It took us 20 years to take Bud Light beer to the No. 1 beer in the country, and it took them one week to dismantle it.”
Lachky left Anheuser-Busch in 2009, shortly after it was purchased by Belgian company InBev. He said the quality of the company’s marketing took an immediate hit after the international conglomerate took over and European executives did not understand the American market. He also said that – now that the Budweiser marketing team is American again – they’re still failing to appeal to their core audience because the staff is dominated by metrosexual coastal elites who don’t understand rural and working-class Americans.
”None of these marketing folks has ever been to a NASCAR race, none has been to a football game or a rodeo,” he said. “That’s insanity. That’s marketing incompetence.”
VP of Bud Light Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid, who was placed on leave and – if the latest statement from executives is to be believed – has already been replaced, mocked the old Lachky ad style in an interview with the Make Yourself At Home podcast on March 31, a day before the Mulvaney disaster unfolded. Heinerscheid called the classic Bud Light marketing “fratty” and “out of touch”.
AB InBev management claims that an outside agency is responsible for the creation of this single can for their partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. CEO Michel Doukeris decried “misinformation” as rumors spread that the can was being mass-produced.
If sales do not recover, or continue to decline, this will represent an even more costly and embarrassing failure than New Coke, the widely-accepted worst marketing disaster in American history.
To date, the company has refused to publicly address the disaster in detail, let alone apologize to core customers for their relationship with Mulvaney, who celebrated “365 days of girlhood” with the announcement of a Bud Light March Madness sponsorship, which “has something to do with sports”.
Some members of the trans community disavowed Mulvaney, citing the over-the-top “woman-face” style of Mulvaney’s social media, which they say appeals to offensive stereotypes about women and makes a mockery of the gender dysphoria that trans folk suffer from. Others were horrified by Mulvaney’s interview with President Joe Biden, where the trans star implored the president to fight for child sex changes to remain legal.
Doukeris expressed confidence that a tripling of Budweiser’s ad budget over the summer would fix the problem. However, the two ads rolled out in the last month were relentlessly mocked online. The latest, “BUD LIGHT SHOWER BEER” which shows a studiously-multiethnic friend group including an interracial couple enjoying Bud Light in the rain at a generic country music festival, has a ratio of 603 likes to an estimated 24,000 dislikes.
"Hey you guys 'member the horses? Non-gay horses?"
— Bennett's Phylactery (@extradeadjcb) April 15, 2023
In the first week of the scandal, Anheuser-Busch InBev stock (BUD) lost $4 billion in market capitalization. As of close of market today, those losses have increased to $10.33 billion. representing 7.8% of the company’s total value.
Anheuser-Busch InBev has not responded to any attempts at contact by Valiant News, or apparently any other news outlet, for that matter.
