That Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney thing showed me how fast a brand can lose half its customers

I was sitting in a bar in Austin three weeks ago, watching some guys argue about whether to order a round of Bud Light. One guy refused flat out, said he'd rather drink water. That's when it hit me how bad that whole campaign backfired. They spent like $2 million on a partnership with one influencer, and within a few months their sales dropped by over 25%. The weird part is nobody I talked to actually cared about the cans themselves, they just got caught in the middle of a culture war. I keep wondering if the brand even understood their own customer base before they greenlit that thing. Has anyone else seen a product just vanish from shelves that fast after a PR move?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamie_white15d ago

Man its wild how fast that stuff escalated. I was at a gas station in Ohio a few months back and the Bud Light in the cooler was literally gathering dust while people bought Coors and Miller like crazy. A buddy of mine who works a distributorship said they had pallets of it just sitting in the warehouse for weeks, nobody wanted to order it for their stores. The whole thing felt less about the beer itself and more like a perfect storm of people drawing a line in the sand over something dumb.

annas8715d ago

You ever try to sell something nobody wants anymore? It's like trying to push a broke-down trailer up a hill... once the word gets out that it's "the thing" to hate on, you're done. My advice is just let it sit and move on to what people actually want to buy. Better off clearing the shelf space for something that moves than trying to push old stock nobody's touching. That's the real lesson here.