I’m sure you’ve been following the saga of the recent fiasco with the influencer Dylan Mulvaney as the new face of Bud Light. I'm not a beer drinker (at all; I simply hate the stuff), so I'm viewing this whole thing as something of a dispassionate observer. But the catastrophic drop in Anheuser-Busch stock is no doubt making some corporate wonks' eyeballs bleed.
There's been a tremendous amount of backpedaling at the company: Last week, Bud Light paused all marketing. Last Friday, Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth released a statement in the blandest possible language, which came nowhere near an acknowledgment that they screwed up, and was widely mocked for being an enormous nothing-burger. Also last Friday, the company released a patriotic pro-America advertisement featuring its famous Clydesdales in an effort to appease its offended market base. (To say it didn't work is to engage in the drollest understatement.)
But the one question I have is this: How did Anheuser-Busch screw up so badly? How on earth did they so misread their customer base? How how how?
I think the answer can be found in an opinion piece by Jeffrey A. Tucker called "What the Bud Light Fiasco Reveals about the Ruling Class." Tucker writes, "The person who made the miscalculation is Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, Vice President in charge of marketing for Bud Light. She explained that her intention was to make the beer King of 'Woke' Beers. She wanted to shift away from the 'out of touch' frat party image to one of 'inclusivity.' By all accounts, she actually believed this. More likely, she was rationalizing actions that would earn her bragging rights within her social circle."
Her social circle. Those are, I believe, the key words. Ms. Heinerscheid is a product of the usual elite educational echo chamber and apparently has never troubled herself to look beyond her "social circle" to understand the marketing base for the company. Instead, she is focused on "how the world should work with theories never actually tested by real-world marketing demands."
Here's the key paragraph in Tucker's column: "[Heinerscheid] is a perfect symbol of a problem that afflicts high-end corporate and government culture: a shocking blindness toward the mainstream of American life, including working classes and other people less privileged. They are invisible to this crowd. And her type is pervasive in corporate America with its huge layers of management developed over 20 years of loose credit and push for token representation at the highest levels."
That's us: The invisible American. In the opinion of the elites, we peons don't exist. Or, if they grudgingly acknowledge we DO exist, our opinions certainly don't matter. Hence, beer advertisements featuring trans people when most trans people don't drink beer.
As an example, consider this April 13 CNN article: "Bud Light's inclusive ad campaigns are good for business, experts say." I should point out this article came out on the same day Yahoo Finance published "Anheuser-Busch stock loses over $5 billion in market cap following backlash to trans spokesperson." Perhaps CNN would care to explain how losing $5 billion (as of a week ago) is "good for business"?
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Personally, if I were a vice president in charge of marketing and had cost a company $5 billion in one week, I think I would reassess the direction of my marketing efforts. But hey, that's just me.
Remember that reference to social circles? I wonder how often these corporate marketing elites actually rub shoulders with the people who buy their products. Do they know any members of the working class? Do they know any loggers, butchers, taxi drivers, or mechanics? Do they wonder why we don't just eat cake?
So why did Budweiser launch this "inclusive" ad campaign? It's quite simple: They (the elites) know what we (the peons) should support, and that's all there is to it. Since they never step outside their own echo chamber to rub shoulders with the oil rig workers, seamstresses, waitresses, welders and ranchers who buy their products, why should they think any differently?
"The marketing director of Bud Light talked a good line about 'inclusivity,'" wrote Tucker, "but she plotted to impose everything but that. Her plan was designed for the one percent and to the exclusion of all the people who actually consume the product, to say nothing for the workers who actually make and deliver the product she was charged with promoting."
I know these corporate elites think the Budweiser boycott is just a silly temper tantrum, and we'll all come around at some point. "Often the backlash blows over, while the long-term benefits are more impactful," CNN intones as it defends Heinerscheid's marketing strategy. "'What we see predominantly is the social media backlash … is often very short-lived,' said Pedr Howard, head of the creative excellence practice at the market research firm Ipsos. 'The conversation moves on.' If the campaign was well considered, a 'week of bad social media reactions isn't really that much of a downside, in the grand scheme of things,' he said. 'Social media noise isn't the whole world. It's often just a very small, loud microcosm.'"
In other words, we invisible Americans should just shut up and sit down.
But you know what? Occasionally Atlas shrugs; and when that happens, Anheuser-Busch will whine that it didn't see that happen, and their marketing failure is due to, um, racism or some other -ism.
Whether Budweiser can weather this storm or not, I don't know. But if it's done nothing else, it has revealed what the elites think of the peons that form their marketing base. We are invisible. We're not important. Our opinions don't exist.
For all you beer drinkers out there, there are thousands of craft beers available, which I'm told taste wonderful. Maybe it's time to try them out.
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