Bud Light with All The Public Attention... And For All The Wrong Reasons.

18/07/2023 - Oxford.ing

Now, I've really struggled to select a title for this small-come-slightly-large little thing we'll just call 'the elephant in the room' for now. I kinda liked the idea of going down the 'Don't mess with beer!' sort of avenue, and 'What the Bud!'. But I figured this is deeper than the bottom of a 330ml can of kind of alright by British standards beer.

This really is an interesting event in the recent history of marketing and advertising, and really makes me want to grab the big companies by their collars and ask them, 'Is this really what you want?'. The answer is pretty simple, pretty obvious, and that's clearly a 'well no... But wouldn't it be nice if you were all different?'

The backlash from Anheuser Busch's Dylan Mulvaney Face-Can debacle is what most would describe as 'probably not the best choice we could have made' and it clearly shows now that we can see the event's impacts in all its financial and social glory.

If you've been mimicking a slug and hiding under a brick in a garden for the last 3 ish months then you'll probably have no idea what we're all going on about but the general chain of events that have bought us to this point is quite simple really, and goes like this:

1 - Have a beloved American Icon of Middle American Blue Collar workers as a client (This is the role played by Captiv8), and put it under the stewardship of a well-experienced and progressive thinker (a role played by Alissa Heinerscheid).

2 - Conduct constant and consistent market analysis on who your customer base is, why they drink the product you offer, how they drink the product you offer, when they drink the product you offer, and where they drink the product you offer. With all this, you should be able to get a fairly good insight into the sort of lifestyle of the product user and general client base.

(A tip for doing this well and succeeding at this stage is considering any existing data sets your client already has, and who they would like to attract more of in the future).

3 - Disregard this information almost immediately and attempt to break into a new demographic, highlighting the importance of diversity to ESG investors and creditors, with the intention of ensuring the company's future abilities to take out lines of credit, even though their cash wallet is fairly chunky at any given moment.

(Another tip for this to be really successful is to totally disregard the feelings, moral and social values of your client's strongest and most consistently performing and purchasing customer base. This way, not only do they then know that their opinions are not respected, warranted, or valued by the client, but also further help the pre-existing and perpetuating biases facing these communities by reiterating the point that they never mattered as people, and that their just a source of income to keep the machine moving.

4 - Develop a marketing campaign that isolates 98.99% of their entire customer base, making their existing customer base angry for being ignored and disappointed in the client for apparently never understanding who the customers actually are as people. If you have a brief moment, make sure not to release any other additional advertisement campaigns to ensure that the only marketing currently circulating digital and social spaces, is this piece of work. This will be helpful to your client's competitors as they begin to take larger shares of market capital.

5 - Instead of backing up and admitting to a failure to 'read the room' of just who your client's customers actually are, double down with the dissemination of additional and further isolating marketing materials, this will help more of the clients customers in their move to different beverage providers even if the customers themselves believe the competitor's products to be inferior to your own clients.

6 - This next bit requires some skill, but you must cultivate this environment to discourage your original customer base from purchasing your product even further by gaslighting them, suggesting that both religious and cultural beliefs are the reason they are unaccepting of the changes and that it has nothing to do with the fact that they have been totally sidelined in a game where 98.99% of the players are the same blue-collar middle Americans.

7 - This is the stage where you take a step back and enjoy the screams and the panic of the client's frantic phone calls and board meetings, and watch as the company that hired you to further stabilise and expand their client base loses $27 Billion in less than 100 days.

8 - This is the point where you get a call to say that you'll no longer be receiving any calls from that client in the future as they're gunna look for options with different marketing and PR Agencies.

And there you have it kids! A sure-fire way to remove yourself from the work environment, and the best thing about it is, 'it only took a total destruction of a Legacy of American Iconography, and $27 Billion Dollars!'.

Now, if you cant tell that last bit is a bit of sarcasm, but for the most part the rest is a fairly accurate and sure-fire way to wreck any business let alone an iconic big-name brand known around the entire world. But the truth about this whole thing goes even deeper than just making a 'dumb' marketing choice, and could potentially go even lower than just the surface tension of 'woke' marketeering making dumb decisions.

What if this is more to do with the ESGs than people are really prepared to admit? What if we're living in a time where businesses, regardless of their size or influence, are so terrified of not having financial backing, that they'll do quite literally anything to make sure their options stay open, even if that means compromising their company's ethos, morals, integrity and reputation to be allowed a slightly greater level of financial security. It feels like we're living in a time when companies are on a tightrope-sized walkway that used to be a ballroom of entrepreneurial creativity and fiscal freedom. It feels like all these rules and social demand requirements of modern companies from financial backers of state governments, are leading us down a dangerous path where business and social freedoms are being sacrificed in exchange for a supposed increase in a company's longevity and prosperity. When in reality all we're doing is further perpetuating issues and labelling the ones who don't agree with hideous and degrading designations, whilst simultaneously claiming to be on 'the right side of history'.

I did have two other strange theories that I think are simply more conspiracy ideas than real concepts, but what if this is just the start of a mass product manipulation by 'those that run things?'.

What if we're living in a point where a company such as AB InBev wanted to entice new product consumers and slowly remove their old customer base, in order to change the actual product but keep the products name? Hell, they could even keep the ingredients and the packaging the same, because at the end of the day, people buy a product they connect with, and when blue-collar middle Americans and the odd frat boy bought a crate of Bud Light, they weren't just buying a mix of hops, barley, rice, sugar and water.

They were buying a brand.

What if we're at a point in market history where the change is one that no one actually wants but the 'people that run things' want so that they can further change the way that people consume, and more importantly, are 'influenced' by their products?

It's just a brief concept but this idea would explain a lot of other changes going on in different markets and media narratives at the moment.

Cannabis or 'marijuana' as our trans-Atlantic friends like to call it, has once again become the enemy in different states after passing laws to re-illegalise it and prevent businesses from profiteering, whilst simultaneously allowing pharmaceutical companies to profit from CBD and THC-derived medications. A little bit strange don't you think, considering how awesome they all thought that stuff was not three years ago?

But the key point about this whole thing is on the issue of why we ended up here in the first place right? How did a brand so massive and beloved fall so far from its branch on the tree?

The honest answer isnt really as clear as we want it to be in reality. We all want to go about pointing the finger saying, 'c'mon it's very clearly [insert fundamental marketing flaw here]!' or that 'they didn't focus on [insert fundamental marketing concept here] enough from the get-go!'. But what if it's more challenging than this? What if the people deciding on what a brand should be, aren't allowed to be the ones who decide what a brand is allowed to become?

Just a bit of food for your little thought boxes you call brains.

Peace!