Immediately after Kid Rock posted a video last week of him shooting up Bud Light cans in response to their recent promotion with trans person Dylan Mulvaney, numerous conservatives applauded the video and called for a boycott of the beer brand. Now, anonymous sources at Anheuser-Busch, who owns Bud Light, claim that the higher-ups never even approved such a promotion.
The one who went forward with the promotion is the company’s VP of Marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid. During a video interview last month on the Make Yourself At Home podcast, she said that Bud Light had to move with the times and get away from their “fratty” image. The irony there is two-fold. First of all, beer and “fratty” go hand-in-hand, so trying to move away from that is not exactly ideal from a business sense. Secondly, photos of a beer-guzzling Heinerscheid at a frat party made their rounds on social media this week, suggesting there is a slightly hypocritical aspect of her new agenda. Of course, those photos are likely many years old, but her enjoyment of frat parties seems to contradict her present motivation.
That motivation, by her own admission, was inspired by her bosses asking her to help make the brand more “inclusive.” However, unnamed employees at the company now say that a promotion with such a popular trans influencer was not at all what they had in mind.
There has been speculation online that numerous executives were angered by the move, which prompted The Daily Wire to investigate further. They claim that multiple sources told them the promotion was not approved by the higher-ups, with one source specifically stating, “No one at a senior level was aware this was happening.”
That source added further specifics, saying, “Some low-level marketing staffer, who helps manage the hundreds of influencer engagements they do, must have thought it was a big deal.”
The promotion seems to have annoyed numerous bosses at the company, but the next step may not be to comment at all on the issue as they have mostly stuck to a statement made last week. One source stated that they are “not a political company,” and said, about the partnership with Mulvaney, “It was a mistake.”
Many claim that the backlash has cost Bud Light billions of dollars in market value, but that is misleading. Anheuser-Busch stock did indeed drop by about 3% since the backlash, but that’s after a rise of 8% a week earlier, which helped the stock hit a 52-week high.
At this point, the apparent problem might not be the Mulvaney promotion at all, however. The backlash certainly began because of that, but Heinerscheid’s interview from last month is somewhat cringeworthy to watch at times, especially as she all but insults the customers who have consumed the product, literally, for years. She stated, “Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
If you refer to your long-time loyal customer base as “out-of-touch,” then what do you expect to happen? If you want to get away from how those customers make the company look, then it appears you’ve succeeded.