(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Bud Light plans to spend a lot of money on a major marketing campaign, hoping that it will save the company after its sales tanked in response to a partnership with a so-called “transgender” influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
According to the Post Millennial, Benj Steinman, editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights, said that on Monday Anheuser-Busch executives told U.S. beer distributors at a closed-door meeting in Washington, D.C., that they will “spend heavily on the brand after spending fell off a cliff last year.”
He also added that the new marketing blitz will begin this week, as an attempt of a beer giant to reverse the damage from the ill-advised Mulvaney campaign which tanked Bud Light sales by 17% the week ending Apr. 15.
On Wednesday, Steinman wrote in a report to clients that Anheuser-Busch “did promise to spend lotsa dough on Bud Light [marketing] this spring and summer, starting with a big push this week for the NFL draft.”
A Northeast-based distributor also said that, in a series of private Zoom meetings, Bud Light pledged to US beer distributors that this month, “…there will be an improved screening process before any marketing hits the public,” and that “executives will have to go through a more rigorous screening process.”
Steinman added that the meeting “wasn’t that productive and the distributors were hoping for more concrete plans” on how to stop the backlash against Bud Light because they “want to put this behind them.”
A lot of Anheuser-Busch’s 400 distributors left the meeting frustrated. According to a report from the industry newsletter Beer Business Daily, the reason why that happened was because Anheuser-Busch never apologized for “what they’ve gone through and the lost business they’ve had to deal with.”
“Wholesalers have long felt that Anheuser-Busch was too focused on innovation and not enough on their bread-and-butter brands,” Steinmann said.
