The people in charge at Anheuser-Busch are probably having second thoughts about establishing a partnership with transgender “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney. There’s an old saying in the marketing game that informs us that all publicity is good publicity as long as they spell your name correctly. This episode may be proving that established wisdom as being incorrect. Everyone can spell “Bud Light,” and an increasing number of people have learned Mulvaney’s name. (I’d never heard of him before this.) But the sole purpose of a marketing deal is to boost sales and increase the value of your shareholders’ investments. This has done the opposite in a fairly dramatic way. Shares in Anheuser-Busch plummeted almost 4% in barely a week, with a 1.5% drop being registered yesterday. (NY Post)

Beer colossus Anheuser-Busch saw its value plummet more than $5 billion since the company announced its branding partnership with controversial transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Since March 31, shares of Bud Light’s parent company have fallen by nearly 4% — knocking down the company’s market capitalization from $132.38 billion to $127.13 billion on Wednesday.

Anheuser-Busch stock fizzled more than 1.5% on Wednesday.

Four percent may not sound like all that much, but when you’re talking about a company the size of Anheuser-Busch, that adds up to more than five billion dollars. It’s nothing to sneeze at. And there really haven’t been any other relevant developments related to the brewing company in the news lately, so the plunge is clearly a direct result of the Mulvaney announcement.

The social media accounts for Bud Light have effectively gone dark since this campaign blew up. We also haven’t heard much from their woke VP of marketing since she decided to publicly insult the majority of the company’s target market. But it doesn’t require much of a stretch of the imagination to guess that the people sitting around the table at their board of directors are probably really missing Spuds MacKenzie about now.

It’s not just the shareholders who are currently taking a beating. As Katie Pavlich reports at Townhall, the smaller merchandisers who distribute Bud Light to bars and retail stores are paying a heavy price.

Now, merchandisers whose livelihoods depend on the sale of the Bug Light brand are warning about the consequences of Heinerscheid’s decision to destroy the brand.

“I’ve never seen such little sales in the past few days on these products and it’s sad because if people don’t buy this beer I don’t make money and I can’t feed my family. So it’s kind of heartbreaking…I guess that Anheuser Busch did what they did. They don’t know their clientele,” a Bud Light merchandiser posted in a video on Twitter.

I’ll confess that I didn’t fully understand the initial uproar over the campaign because I really don’t have a horse in this race. I haven’t had a beer in more years than I care to remember. (I prefer martinis or an occasional glass of wine with dinner.) And even when I did drink beer it was never Bud Light.

As for Mulvaney, he’s a legal adult. How any other adult chooses to dress or what they call themself really isn’t my business either. As long as you’re not mutilating children or attacking people with unpopular opinions, feel free to live your own life. But when it comes to the corporate decisions being made at Anheuser-Busch, this isn’t a matter of right vs wrong or illegal activities. We’re talking about marketing and brand ownership, so image is everything. By now, we’re all familiar with the term “go woke, go broke.” And we have that phrase in our collective lexicon for a reason.

I don’t know how Budweiser digs itself out of this hole. Perhaps dropping Mulvaney’s contract and issuing a heartfelt apology to all their customers could put this in their rearview mirror eventually. But that’s a pretty large plate of crow to ask them to eat.