Longing for Spuds McKenzie
You remember Spuds…the dog who was super cool and served as mascot for a relatively new beer brand at the time, Bud Light. The use of the dog in commercials in the late 1980s led to a 20 percent increase in sales of the beer in just one year.
The use of a male who claims to be a female in more recent advertising had the opposite effect, of course. Sales dropped by nearly 30 percent over the past month, and now the company is trying to help its innocent distributors who are the ones who are on the hook for all this beer no one wants to buy any more.
Bud Light has reportedly informed wholesalers it would buy back unsold beer once it expires. In other words, if a local distributor cannot move the product before it spoils, the company will buy it back so the local folks are not financially harmed.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Anheuser-Busch works with 385 independent distributors, or wholesalers, across the country, noting that many are family-owned businesses that have carried Anheuser-Busch products for generations.
To be fair, the new promotion that drew such fire was on social media, with a mock up of a can, that was never for sale to the public. But in the world of social media, the thing went viral and for all the wrong reasons.
But it is quickly becoming a textbook example of how to alienate your loyal core audience while trying to expand to reach new ones. Given the hit the company’s other brands have taken, it’s become a colossal blunder. At least the company is helping the folks who are in our communities, the distributors, so the harm to them from the company’s woke behavior will be limited.
