Your Precious Capitalism Won't Save You!

... or will it? Five things we can we learn from Bud Light lighting its own brand on fire

Brave reader, I dare you to stare into… the eyes… OF MAAAAAADNESS!!!

Things have been going great for Bud Light lately. Their collaboration with Dylan Mulvaney (who is either batshit crazy or crazy like a fox) has cratered their sales and their market share. Heck, even desperate Red Sox fans won’t buy their swill. However, this situation grows far more complex and didactic as one digs deeper. Submitted for your approval, here are a few nuggets I dredged up from the Thought Mines.

1. I believe we are still at a phase where putting financial pressure on companies can have an effect. And, yes, even “the Right” can apparently apply said pressure with some degree of effectiveness—something interestingly associated more with “the Left” as of late. So, the Conservatives have reasserted control over the levers of the free market, and that machine shall save them from the predations of oppressive Wokesters who had attempted to hijack it to serve their own fringe, corrupt, crazy, communist ideological perversions! The adults are back in charge, right? Well, about that…

2. Before people get ahead of themselves, I would remind them that companies are increasingly concerned with “Environmental, Social, and Governance Scores” (ESG). This subverts everything. The benefits awarded to them for supporting Ecomanical and Woke Identitarian policies now (or, if not, soon) may outweigh even consumer abandonment and stockholder tantrums, traditionally considered checks and balances on brand behavior, for better or worse. Those on the Right, in particular, need to get their heads around this pronto and understand their beloved capitalism won’t save them. Especially with monopolistic entities, these monoliths could always piss off their consumers and then dare them to go elsewhere: most proles won’t or can’t. Now, those consumers will have to buy into The Current Thing, literally and figuratively, whether they like it or not. Even other, comparatively smaller, companies will be increasingly eager to sacrifice sales and stock prices at the Altar of ESG if things continue down this path.

   

3. Michel Doukeris, the chief executive of Bud Light parent company “Transheuser-Busch” InBev, recently came out and blathered about how the deranged Dylan Mulvaney promotion was basically just a one-off and not a full campaign, pleading that the blowback they were receiving was unwarranted and based on the dreaded “misinformation.” This is partly true, as it was essentially a one-off, but I suspect that is only—and precisely—because of the blowback, and it would have been a larger campaign had it been received more in line with the expectations of their lunatic (former?) marketing VP. Again, as we often say here: more than one thing can be true at once. Is consumer pressure exerting influence? I believe yes. Is that now only a single variable of diminishing importance in this equation? I also believe yes.

4. It is funny to see people calling out Bud’s obviously pandering follow-up advertisements, which trotted out the usual tropes of horses, ‘Murka, good times with pals, and other vague marketing clichés to win back their fleeing consumer base. Of course, people are right that it is naked pandering, but people are acting like Bud has just now turned to this tactic in light of the recent PR debacle. This is what they always do! This is every commercial, including the Mulvaney promotion. That one was just trying to pander to a different demographic. It is all pandering, marketing is pandering. If people are just now figuring that out, better now than never, I suppose, but make no mistake: there is always an angle.

   

5. In today’s polarized political milieu, advertising is like karate, you have to pick a side. Left or Right. If you try to walk down the middle of the road—BAM!—”squished like grape!” just like Mr. Miyagi taught us. Or, if you prefer a slightly more Biblical analogy, being lukewarm will only get you vomited forth from the mouth of God the consumer. I say this because Bud Light’s aforementioned attempt to retreat back into the once-safe ramparts of pandering and placation has backfired completely. First, Bud thought it could sneak in some Woke ESG points with freak show headliner Mulvaney without raising too much ire with those crass, troglodyte frat boys and rednecks who actually bought their piss water. Or, perhaps, as mentioned above, they just didn’t care about customers or sales… at the time. But, the sleeping dragon of frat boys and rednecks was awoken from its slumber, scorching Bud Light with their frat boycott, causing them enormous financial damage. Bad news, right? Yup, but Bud only exacerbated things by trying (and failing) to appease the affronted Right with that lukewarm, non-committal, quasi-walking back of the Woke promo because now that, in turn, enraged the Left, who viewed it as a betrayal of Bud’s assumed newfound fealty to the Trans Empire. So, now, people on the Left are boycotting Bud Light, too! Bud would have been better off either running an ad that said “Fuck you, deplorables!” with a picture of Hillary Clinton and Dylan Mulvaney flipping off the camera, or running an ad that said “Fuck you, trannies!” with a picture of Donald Trump and Matt Walsh flipping off the camera.

   Instead, they are swerving around in the middle of the road (to keep mixing my metaphors) and getting royally squished in the process. In the end, this is just further proof of my iron-clad maxim that we could solve all of the world’s problems if we would just listen to Mr. Miyagi.

   

NOTE (5/9/23):

Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire has a great Twitter thread further delving into this topic that can be found here. Enjoy!