How the Bud Light Debacle Predicted America's Corporate Vibe Shift

Lessons In Navigating The Culture War

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Notes On the Great Vibe Shift
The Death of Scenius

When I worked in advertising, I was often struck by the power of consumer inertia. Consumers are creatures of habit. They have their preferred brands of toothpaste or baked beans or laptop and these preferences are very hard to shift. Despite the fond imaginings of brand owners, this is rarely because consumers have a strong attachment to the brands in question, but because once they have established a preference they usually can’t be bothered to re-evaluate their choices. Big brands often have strong distribution advantages too. The upshot is that they can be mediocre or poor for a long time before suffering any penalty for it.

I say this to emphasise quite how astonishing was Bud Light’s sudden fall from grace in 2023. It was the biggest beer brand in America, despite its famously bland taste, and seemed in no danger of losing its well-defended position. But in April of that year it ran a minor social media promotion featuring a transgender celebrity, Dylan Mulvaney. Some prominent conservative media figures complained, and a backlash ensued, leading to a mass consumer boycott.

Unlike most consumer boycotts, this one had a huge and damaging impact on the brand. Bud Light lost nearly a third of its sales in the following three months. Even more remarkably, this effect endured (long after the company fired the brand’s marketing director, who had unwisely suggested that the brand was seeking a new, younger audience). It even spread to other parts of the Anheuser-Busch brand portfolio, including its flagship brand, Budweiser. $26 billion was wiped off the company’s share price. Bud Light has never recovered.

In retrospect, the Bud Light affair was a harbinger of the great vibe shift in corporate America. I will return to that topic on Saturday but I wanted to write a separate note on Bud Light. A former Anheuser-Busch employee, who has written a book about the affair, has shed a little light on what went wrong. I think there are lessons for all companies and brands which are struggling to navigate a febrile cultural-political environment.