Bud Light has gone silent on social media

(Bud Light via AP)

Bud Light has gone dead silent on social media since the Dylan Mulvaney controversy hit on April 1st.

Not a peep.

As I write this the company hasn’t said a thing to promote its brand since the massive ratio that hit their last post on Twitter.

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With 10,700 responses to their post and only 741 likes–many of those occurring before the news filtered out–the company is feeling a lot of heat and not liking it. I only browsed a few tens of responses, but it is safe to say that none of them were positive. I am sure that among those thousands there are people who thank the company for being stunning and brave, but how many of those are regular Bud drinkers?

There is a common refrain from conservatives that companies that “get woke go broke,” but the sad fact is that this is an exaggeration. By the nature of business, it is usually the largest companies that get woke. They do so in order to get good ESG scores and kudos from organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, which scores companies on how woke they are, and most medium and small businesses don’t give a hoot about these scores.

Major brands do.

Sure, a few small businesses use political branding–Ben and Jerry’s did even when they were small, certainly–but your average non-conglomerate business needs to stick to its knitting and stay away from politics. And big conglomerates tend to weather storms like this because they have very deep pockets. The people who pay the price tend to be their downstream marketers and suppliers because they don’t have deep pockets.

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Still, it has to hurt when a company screws over its primary group of customers, and many people see siding with the alphabet people as a slap in the face of the blue-collar drinkers of Bud and Bud Light. And as many people on social media claim not to drink the swill, it’s obvious that tons of people do. It is one of the most popular beers in America and one of the biggest brands.

Not everybody is a snob.

But there are similar alternatives. Michelob Miller Light, for instance, is an alternative.

I have never been a boycott type of person, but I have actually begun to do so almost unconsciously. I refuse to use Gillette razors since they insulted men a few years ago, portraying men as filled with toxic masculinity. Obviously, the boycott hasn’t killed Gillette razors, but it sure stuck with some people. It did with me.

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Corporate C-suites have been taken over by people who are not just from a different class than their customers, but with a class of people who absolutely hate the customers they have and want to “upgrade” from the downscale proles whom they have been serving.

One issue, though, for a brand like Bud Light is that the whiney white woke women they are looking to get on board–there simply aren’t enough trans people to fill their niche–is that they aren’t going to become Bud Light drinkers. If they were selling white wine, perhaps, they could switch their customer base.

But Bud Light? A cheap, barely passable beer? This will not appeal to the avocado toast crowd.

Matt Walsh argues we can’t rely on the “get woke go broke” mantra, because it really isn’t true. Instead, he argues we need a more Alinsky-type approach: pick a target and go after them instead of a spray-and-pray strategy. Without a focused campaign, the controversy will be a flash in the pan.

He lays out his plan:

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This argument is clearly true. Most people are, as I used to be, more interested in just living their life than fighting a culture war. That is, after all, how it should be. We are getting dragged into this war (pun intended). If we had our druthers we would rather just live and let live.

But our spaces are getting invaded, and we are being made to choose between affirming the Left’s vision or fighting it.

This has actually been the long-term strategy of the Left, although they now so completely own corporate America that it appears it happened all at once. But the reality is that they got here by picking off a few companies first and intimidating everybody else through example.

There was a time when companies tried to stay away from politics until the Left forced them into it. It started as merely a grift–mostly race-baiters extorting money out of corporate America in exchange for stamps of approval–and then other activists got into the act.

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It has worked for them.

Perhaps Matt is right and conservatives need to do the same thing–not in search of money, but rather as punishment for insulting their customer base.

Already the backlash has caused Bud Light to go silent on social media, and at least temporarily to lose sales. Perhaps a concerted campaign could actually change their behavior.

What do you think?

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 22, 2024
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