Budweiser heir ready to ‘buy back’ brand after transgender row
The heir to brewing giant Anheuser-Busch has said he is ready to buy Bud Light back from its parent company after a marketing campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney triggered a conservative boycott that is still harming sales four months later.
“I think Inbev doesn’t understand who their core drinker is,” Busch told conservative pundit Tomi Lahren on Tuesday, accusing the “woke students” at Bud Light’s marketing team of neglecting the beer’s traditional “fratty” customer base.
“If they don’t want that brand any longer, sell it back to the Busch family, sell it to me,” he offered. “I’ll be the first in line to buy that brand back from you and we’ll make that brand great again.”
Bud Light is produced by the Anheuser-Busch brewing company, which Busch’s family sold to Belgian multinational Inbev in 2008 for $52 billion. Anheuser-Busch InBev, as the corporation was named after the sale, is the world’s largest brewer, and owns dozens of globally-recognized brands of beer, including Becks, Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois.
Anheuser-Busch’s revenue was down 10% in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, the company announced earlier this month. The drop was “primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light,” the firm added.
The company’s woes began when transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney – a biological male who identifies as a woman – shared an Instagram video in April promoting the light beer during the March Madness college basketball tournament. The clip featured Mulvaney in a black cocktail dress and elbow-length gloves, carrying a six-pack of Bud Light. A second segment showed Mulvaney in a bathtub covered in foam, brandishing a can with his face on it.
Conservative pundits and celebrities immediately called for a boycott, with musician Kid Rock filming himself shooting a stack of Bud Light cases in protest.
The boycott worked, and despite Anheuser-Busch suspending two of its top marketing executives in response, sales have continued to plummet. According to Nielsen data cited by Yahoo Finance on Tuesday, Bud Light sales plummeted 26.5% for the week ending August 5, faster than the 25.9% week-on-week decline for the period ending June 17.
The company’s efforts to win back its middle-American customers have fallen flat too. Steep discounts failed to boost sales during the normally lucrative Fourth of July holiday, and an ad depicting a crowd of mostly white people struggling in the summer heat was condemned for its apparent mockery of “regular Americans.”
Mulvaney wasn’t happy about the brand’s U-turn either. “For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse than not hiring a trans person at all,” the influencer said in a video posted to social media in June, adding that LGBTQ customers may also boycott the beer as a result.
