Marketing 101: Don’t be like Bud Light, don’t make your customers look like a bunch of jerks…
The story of BudLight of the AB Inbev group could be taken as the basis of a Marketing and Communications course for a short degree in Business Administration and could be entitled: “ BudLight case: do the opposite of what he did”.
Bud Light was the first beer brand sold, in value and quantity, in the USA and had a solid base of blue-collar working class drinkers. The white-collar, professional classes drink other European craft beers, while Bud is, or rather was, a suburban bar brand.
In the end, the job of Bud Light's marketing and communications manager was the simplest in the world: a little sponsorship of car races, horse races and sporting events, a few contests and it was all done. However, recommendations and genius do hire a Harvard graduate with no specific experience, Alissa Heinerscheid, who decides it is time to get rid of the peasant and drinker clientele to focus on a communication based on a transsexual, Dylan Mulvaney, who she makes fun of, and heavily, women:
This did not please the customers who left Bud Light to switch to the competition, making the Mexican Modelo Especial the best-selling beer by value in the USA…
Now the company has decided to launch a new communication campaign in which it fortunately moves away from gender issues to return "to what is important to our customers". Launch the campaign on twitter. Too bad that this puts the beer clientele in a bad light…
Crack a cold one: we've got an epic summer ahead. Sock tans included. pic.twitter.com/CGRCvkHC60
— Bud Light (@budlight) June 22, 2023
In practice, Bud Light customers are represented as a bunch of idiots who can't put on their shoes before walking on hot asphalt or on stones, who can't close a fridge, or who leave traces of their cell phones while sunbathing or doing drop the snacks because he doesn't see the mosquito net. Obviously they are all white idiots, because minorities don't touch each other, in fact the only black person present is someone who takes a quick beer with an athletic gesture.
Calling your customers an imbecile is not a particularly apt marketing and communication policy. The Tweet has received 1,700 likes and 23,000 insults at the time of writing. A real record!
I think AB Inbev needs a marketing and communication manager if it wants to recommend someone. Better than they have now, which is not complicated.
Thanks to our Telegram channel you can stay updated on the publication of new articles from Economic Scenarios.
The article Marketing 101: don't be like Bud Light, don't make your customers look like a bunch of jerks… comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/marketing-101-non-fate-come-bud-light-non-fate-apparire-i-vostri-clienti-come-un-mucchio-di-cretini/ on Fri, 23 Jun 2023 16:46:08 +0000.