Bud Light is one of the most recognizable beers in the country. This past month, the brand has come under fire from conservatives over their recent campaign putting Dylan Mulvaney, a popular transgender TikTok star, on the can of their beer. This made a lot of conservatives and anti-transgender people upset. This can isn’t even being widely distributed, it was just given to Mulvaney.
This one small change that only affects how some of the beer cans will look for a limited time has made these people so mad. However, nothing of substance has really changed with the beer.
On top of that Anheuser Busch, Bud Light’s parent company, has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to support anti-LGBTQ political campaigns. Putting Mulvaney’s face on some of their cans of their beer won’t change that.
These cans caused a huge backlash among the traditional Bud Light demographic. There have been plenty of videos on social media of people throwing out their cases of Bud Light. The most widely-circulated example of this coming from a video by Kid Rock.
This is just the most recent example of cancel culture on the right. Similar to Keurig and Nike before, this is just conservatives getting mad over non-issues. They then go online, destroy these products and make a big fuss. After about a month, they forget about everything and go back to using these products.
Conservatives like to complain about “the intolerant left” and how liberals love to cancel everything. These same people will then turn around and be upset that the M&M spokes-candies changed shoes. It’s hypocrisy at its finest.
In the immediate aftermath of these “boycotts” you see headlines about how the sales of any given product is down. It’s happening with Bud Light right now, but the sales won’t stay down, and this won’t affect the company. Anheuser Busch’s stock is fine. After the initial launch, the stock price went down a little, but it has bounced right back up.
All Bud Light is doing is putting an influencer on a can to market their product to a wider audience. If they were really looking to help these communities, they would donate funds to LGBTQ+ charities and push their parent company to stop supporting politicians who actively hurt these communities.
Companies like Jack Daniels are doing a full campaign where they are promoting LGBTQ creators in video series and donating money to GLAAD. This campaign is doing far more materially compared to what Bud Light is doing, but it is getting far less backlash from consumers.
This has all shown how little conservatives really care about what they don’t like. They only care about the optics. They don’t care about substance. If Bud Light were to start donating 10% of their profits to charities to help transgender communities, I doubt many people would care.
It’s just a beer can, grow up.
Mark Warren can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @MarkWarren1832
Ralph
Yoooooo, lol. It didn't age well at all. Everything this dude said turned out to go the exact opposite way.
Don Shumaker
Well, this remedial piece of "journalism" hasn't aged very well. This Memorial Day weekend, Transweiser products are literally FREE, with the use of a manufacturer rebate. Sales continue to be so low, the beer maker would rather give away their product than go to the expense of removing expired inventory from store shelves. Isn't the purpose of marketing supposed to increase sales? I believe we can put this social experiment under the category of: What Not To Do In Business. Y'know . . . GO WOKE, GO BROKE.
Mira
What does woke mean? And where’s your business, since you seem so knowledgeable in business practices?