Anheuser-Busch’s gimmicky promotional campaign championing transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney has been a resounding success — for its competitors, whose sales have skyrocketed while Bud Light’s have tanked amid a nationwide conservative boycott.
Bud Light sales plunged 17 percent in the week ended Saturday, according to NielsenIQ sales data analyzed by Bump Williams Consulting, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
By comparison, sales for rival brands Coors Light and Miller Lite each soared 17.6 percent during the same time period, according to the report.
“These numbers are staggering,” beer-centric newsletter Insights Express said Sunday, according to the New York Post. “Right now this is an extremely difficult scenario for Anheuser Busch, the Bud Light brand and for AB distributors.”
“Coors Light and Miller Lite were once again big beneficiaries,” the newsletter said.
Anheuser-Busch’s competitors also have started eating into the beer giant’s market share in the wake of the Mulvaney controversy.
Bud Light’s market share tanked 6.7 percent last week, while Coors Light and Miller Lite each rose 18 percent, according to Insights Express.
This intense backlash is sending the message to corporate America that consumers don’t want their beers with a side of left-wing propaganda.
While the establishment media have tried to downplay the debacle as a passing right-wing temper tantrum, a recent poll found a majority of Americans support the boycott.
It’s not surprising Anheuser-Busch is facing volcanic criticism for alienating its core customers and superfluously injecting woke propaganda into its product marketing campaigns.
“The problem is not just that Mulvaney is only famous for being a man pretending to be a woman, but that Mulvaney is a man acting like a stupid, ridiculous caricature of a woman,” commentary writer Zachary Faria wrote in the Washington Examiner.
“The most notable part of this, though, is how Bud Light reached its incredibly dumb decision to use Mulvaney in an ad campaign through a genuinely dumb assumption that all the brand needed was to get more woke.”
Business journalist Charles Gasparino said Bud Light’s sales plunge is proof that brands need to know their audience.
“According to the latest sales figures, beer drinkers (like many Americans) are a pretty conservative bunch and they’re running away from Bud faster than Joe Biden from reporters,” Gasparino wrote in a New York Post opinion piece.
lol heightened risk? Its their failure they obviously did not know their customer
— Kay El (@snickersquirrel) April 25, 2023
“There’s a good case to be made that the American public have had enough of the proselytizing … The lesson here is: Know your audience. When you preach to them rather than reach out to them, they don’t always forgive — or forget.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
