This Buds for who?
Brand Identity Dysphoria strikes again. Why do marketers insist on alienating their own audiences?
I don’t drink beer, but when I did, I’d occasionally have a very average one called Bud Light. It’s a passable beer when one plans on imbibing a number of them consecutively, most often, as one is also consuming a ball game of some sort.
Now, I don’t have access to specific data as to who, exactly, drinks Bud Light. But as a marketer that created multi-million dollar campaigns for billion-dollar brands like Pepsi and Taco Bell, I’d wager that Bud Light’s core consumer is unlikely to be into trans women who like to occasionally dress up as 6 year old girls.
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By now you might think I’ve started drinking again. I assure you, I haven’t. However, the marketers at Anheueser-Bush may well have been on a bender when they conceived this effervescent can of gender fluidity.
I’m talking about the latest marketing stunt from Bud Light, in which media darling and trans woman, Dylan Mulvaney, received a special edition can, with Dylan’s face tattooed on it, to help she/her “celebrate 365 days of womanhood”. Bud Light was clearly hoping Mulvaney would then post about it, which he obligingly did. (Tampax also recently tapped Mulvaney as a brand ambassador. According to Mulvaney, he carries the feminine hygiene products, which he admittedly has no use for, to hand out to biological women who might actually need a spare.)
Now, once upon of time, you’d be right to assume brands CAREFULLY selected influencers to be their brand ambassadors. Influencers were chosen because of their brand fit and selected because they might actually use the product and have obvious appeal to brand’s target audience. (In Bud Light’s case, their core audience is likely mainly composed of male, very heterosexual sports fans.)
In fact, intentionally appealing to this crowd for the last 50 years has helped make Bud Light the number one selling beer in America. Yet apparently, bored with their market dominance, Bud Light has decided to commit brand suicide, like so many others (Disney, Hershey’s, Gillette etc. etc.)
SO, WHY ARE SO MANY BRANDS SEEMINGLY ACTING AGAINST THEIR OWN SELF INTEREST?
When I saw this stunt from Bud Light, I sarcastically tweeted: “Such an obvious fit”. To which, Tiffany Justice, cofounder of Moms For Liberty, in response to my tweet replied, “so why do they do it?”. Meaning, why do brands purposely alienate their consumers these days?
Good question.
After all, Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesperson for Bud Light makes as much sense as Kryptonite Jewelers being the official sponsor of Superman.
So, as a marketing expert/insider, I’ll attempt to offer a few reasons brands are increasingly engaging in acts of self-immolation, such as this one by Bud Light.
The woke capture of Corporate America is complete: Wokeness swept into the Corporate America in earnest after George Floyd was killed in 2020. I was there. I witnessed it first hand. Like a Maoist revolution, corporations - who had only been flirting with DEI before - felt the need to prostrate themselves before the DEI cult or be called racist. Now, anyone who has knelt to the woke mob knows, once you do, the cult will keep you on your knees with ever more ridiculous demands. Corporations, in other words - like universities - have been seized by little Maoists, who insist on absolute ideological conformity. And most members of Corporate C-suites aren’t about to do the right thing and speak out against woke totalitarianism because that would jeopardize their sweet stock package. So the Children of the Corn are running Corporate America at this point. Anyone who dared said “no” to the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light can would be called a “transphobe” and sacrificed to the wokeists. One more heretic burned at the stake! The fact is, the sane adults in companies have either been purged, cowed into silence or are feigning wokeness, foolishly not understanding that eventually the cult will devour them too.
Bud Light. The official beer of He Who Walks Behind The Rows. Most advertising and marketing folks have zero in common with average Americans - The ad world is filled with woke progressives who, frankly, resent capitalism and America. Most of my advertising colleagues really wanted to be screen writers, novelists, artists or musicians. That didn’t work out. But since they like nice things, like avocado toast, wealthy zip codes and tony private schools for their kids, they ended up shilling for corporations (whom they otherwise hate) because it pays well. Furthermore, most ad agencies - who brands hire to communicate their messages - reside in deeply blue parts of the country. They have no clue what their consumers think, nor do they care to know.
I remember once traveling to a NASCAR event because my then client, BallPark Franks, wanted to do a sponsorship with them. We were there researching the sport and its fans. I’ll never forget how my progressive coworkers regarded the NASCAR crowd: it was as if we had landed on Mars and average middle class Americans were alien life forms from another galaxy. The RVs, the grilling, the tailgating… these activities were as foreign to them as Aztec cultural practices from 500 years ago. I remember the brand strategist I went with was vegan (we were selling meat). In short, ad professionals don’t have a clue who typical Americans are, nor do they want to know them. To ad industry peeps, flyovers are backward primitives who deserve only to be conquered. Or, at the very least, marketing folks feel red-staters deserve to have their sloped-foreheaded notions of the binary nature of gender challenged - even if it’s by Bud Light.
Most Ad Agency creatives are in it for the awards - You know how Hollywood likes to make movies to be admired and awarded by other people in Hollywood? The ad industry is worse. What most advertising professionals really want is to win awards for their ads, from other ad people. Often the creators of the ideas don’t care if the concepts even work, for the most part. Ad creatives (the folks in ad agencies who come up with the ideas), want to go to the Cannes Lions Festival in France, an advertising and marketing show that celebrates creativity. And there are dozens of other awards shows. Once upon of time, these award shows honored great advertising - that truly worked - for brands. Those days are gone. Now they honor banal, woke advertising which is conformist, overly worthy and a bore. In any case, when an agency creative person makes an ad they generally ask, “will this win me an award?”. Which also explains why they jump on cultural bandwagons, like radical gender ideology, because they think - and they’re probably right - that some woke judge will give them a gold statue for their Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney stunt.
The Cannes Advertising Festival will surely debut their Trans Lion soon. “Diversity” initiatives, in practice, yield total conformity - Corporations and ad agencies yammer on endlessly about “diversity” and “inclusion”, the idea being that if companies had more of both it would in improve their businesses. How? Ostensibly, by encouraging divergent thinking, which should naturally arise from have truly diverse perspectives. But of course, in practice, diversity means everyone looks different, but must thinking exactly the same (woke). So when a Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light can idea is brought forward, who would even think to point out that it will likely alienate more than half of Bud’s audience? Radical gender ideology is so, like, the next cool thing, right? Everyone’s doing it! And besides, it’s Trans Visibility week everyone! (This is how the conversation would likely go.) And because nobody with a divergent view exists in these ad agencies or marketing depts. - thanks to DEI - corporations and ad agencies are nothing more than echo chambers where people with “diverse” pronouns all high five each other for being a conformist. Yeah, diversity!
Anheuser-Busch is likely pumping up its ESG Score (Environment, Social, and Governance) - If you haven’t heard of ESG, you will. It’s essentially a governance system being imposed by the United Nations, and evangelized by NGOs like the World Economic Forum, to make The Fortune 100/500 heel to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). So, what are the UN’s 17 SDGs? It’s too much to post about here, but in short, the goals sound lovely, but it’s just a smokescreen for a government/corporate takeover that seeks to use its power to force everyone to do its bidding (and make gazillions while posing as philanthropists). ESG puts corporations under the control of the UN by proxy. In other words, corporations get an ESG score and to score well they must focus on “sustainability” rather than just profits. What makes a business “sustainable”? It’s not what you think. It’s not just about being “environmental”, per se. It’s also about embracing notions like “equity” (that’s just a pretty word for socialism/communism). And embracing things like Diversity and Inclusion, which are essentially just cultural Marxism. Corporations will be graded on how well they adhere to ESG, which advances the UN’s SDGs. And that means, if corporations don’t promote wokeness, in all its forms, like radical trans ideology, they won’t get funded by the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard etc. That’s how you get a Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney trans can. Anheuser-Busch is behaving just as a brand would if it wants to up its ESG score.
SO, SHOULD WE EXPECT MORE TRANS CANS OF BUD LIGHT? YES, UNTIL WE SAY “NO”.
The Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light special edition can is just more proof that free market capitalism is dead. It’s been dead for awhile, of course. But now we have traded it for woke capitalism. And woke capitalism isn’t really capitalism at all. It’s a simulacrum of it, wherein corporations marry Big Brother and employ only woke NPC foot soldiers, who don’t know - or care about - average Americans. Woke Capitalism isn’t truly responsive to market forces, because it’s more concerned with pleasing NGO/government edicts, and appearing woke, then it is about pleasing the consumer. Which is why Fortune 100/500 companies will keep serving its consumers woke stupidity on blast, even if it makes their own consumers hate them, because companies are incentivized to do so. And they see woke capitalism as the path of least resistance.
Until, that is, we say “no” en masse.
In truth, average Americans have the ultimate say: the power of the wallet. But so far, we’ve been too lazy to use it.
It’s enough to drive a person to drink.
But here’s to hoping the Dylan Mulvaney can is enough to make millions want to, finally, put down their Bud Lights.
(*If you’re a brand looking for help and you want to avoid woke agencies, reach out… love to help you do some great marketing that actually charms, informs and engages your consumer. Imagine that.)
30 years as an agency person with AB. Thanks for letting me retire at 51…you are now dead to me.
great coverage