My Marketing Tranifesto

I find myself enthralled with the Bud Light situation because it hits me from a few different angles. More than most, I am acutely aware of most things Budweiser branded because I was raised by the biggest and best Budweiser brand ambassador on the planet, yeah, say it with me – “Ron”. In addition to that, while searching the dusty and vast Pate family archives for photographic evidence of Ron’s Budweiser prowess, I happened across a picture of my older brother Dean when he was clearly exploring his transgender phase in late October 1976. The call of the patriotic bi-centennial years must have been strong, because I was clearly identifying as half spider superhero during my arachnid fluid period. In retrospect, I’m glad no one surgically installed four extra fake appendages based on the fantasies I had at age seven.

Budweiser was Ron’s brand of choice, to my earliest recollections, and his fondness for the “King of Beers” flowed throughout my childhood years like a freshly tapped keg at a frat party. As described in an earlier piece of writing, TheVan had a custom shifter fabricated from a Budweiser beer tap and was adorned with other Budweiser paraphernalia, but it didn’t stop there. Ron had a host of hats, T-shirts, shoes, & shorts all covered with the familiar label of Bud. We had a basement bar in our home decorated with beer lights, signs, and other memorabilia. I don’t know that I can accurately depict Ron’s ties to Budweiser during my formative years, but it was everywhere. Budweiser even sponsored the backboard of our sloped, cracked concrete, backyard basketball court. I am not making this up.

As a student of business and economics, I’m always interested in understanding the flows of money and market share across whatever industry I’m looking at. This may be sad to say, but I actually consider concepts like brand equity, market-share, and customer goodwill every single day. As an adult-life-long salesperson, I like to notice what companies do well, and sometimes more importantly, what they do poorly.

I notice and study how companies grow market-share and increase brand-loyalty by using celebrity endorsements. A couple weeks ago, I went to see the movie “Air”, not because I like NBA basketball (I used to), not because I love the 80’s nostalgia & music (I do), not because I like Michael Jordan (arguably G-o-a-t), but because I wanted to see the story of how the Air Jordan brand was created and leveraged into the global powerhouse it is today. Coincidentally, I saw a Ferrari with an Air Jordan silhouette badge, parked outside my hotel just this week. The Air Jordan brand has one of the strongest and most valuable consumer brand images known to man. It takes hard work, vision, and money to build up something like that.

As I poured through my thoughts this week, watching Bud Light bleed market-share and their customer goodwill for the first time, at a pace I haven’t seen since the “New Coke” debacle, I watched in wide eyed wonder at just how something as small as Dylan Mulvany’s penis could have such a large impact destroying an iconic brand, with the potential of more collateral damage to the five hundered (500) other brands InBev owns. While I know Tiktok “influencers” can make some impact and generate sales, I am confounded at Tranhauser-Busch’s ability to piss away hundreds of millions from the seat in a stall of an anonymous ladies room.

The throne of the “King of Beers” carries a different connotation for me this month than it did for the past 50 years.

This debacle will be a business case study that will be studied for years at schools like Harvard and Wharton which are two schools which have enjoyed impeccable reputations for years. These two schools, with annual tuitions exceeding 50 & 80 thousand dollars respectfully have allegedly created and honed some of the greatest business minds on the planet. Incidentally they also created and honed the business mind that created this colossal failure. Yes, the chick that ruined Bud Light is an undergrad alumni of Harvard and has an MBA from Wharton. I can’t help but think that my essay on NASCAR and NHL hockey should be required reading at these schools from now on. The negligence displayed by knowing nothing of your customer profile raises to an almost criminal level in my mind. The shareholders, workers, and other stakeholders are paying dearly for her hubris. I don’t blame Alissa alone, InBev, is responsible for this faux pas and will ultimately pay the bill to the tune of hundreds of millions. This has not enhanced my opinion of our educational institutions.

Dear Harvard & Wharton,

How could you let someone so out of touch with the common man/woman graduate with delusions of grandeur?

Sincerely,

The class of Introduction to Marketing 101, Kent State, 1988

While I don’t consider not knowing your market a cardinal business sin, I do consider not knowing you don’t know your market to be one. (Read that again). I don’t know about you, but this graduate/alumni of the powerhouse advanced education providers Kent State and Cleveland State finds this unbelievably fascinating. I’ve read that Bud Light sales cratered 30% in stores, and 50% in bars in a week’s time. Those are staggering sobering statistics to anyone in business. The beauty of what I see is how this plays out across the markets. The “fake chick with penis” campaign as I’ve come to call it, didn’t hurt the beer market overall, it’s only banging Bud Light like a rear screen door in a tornado. Other companies like Coors (go Bandit) and Heineken (tastes like skunk-piss to me) have to be licking their chops and dancing in the streets silently watching this tranwreck.

Can you imagine the laughter and tears of joys in beer boardrooms around the world? It’s been related to me that the CEO of GiantBeerCoInc needed to be revived after he calculated the new size of his bonus after watching his biggest competitor slam they/them’s dick in the door. He then had to be re-revived when he read that sitting down to pisspoor probably AI generated response from the CEO of Bud Light that said nothing in a couple hundred words.

Everyone in the beer business, not affiliated with Bud Light, is having the greatest month of their career.

My mind reels because Bud Light is the biggest brand in it’s space, it’s the Tesla of the EV market, it’s the Kleenex of disposable snot rags, its the Starbucks of shitty coffee! It’s the elusive 900 pound gorilla we marketers hear about. It’s parent company InBev’s global revenue is about $60 billion (with a B) dollars. For perspective: 120 countries on Earth have a GDP smaller than this beer company’s sales. Bud Light’s contribution to that total number is somewhere around $6 billion, but it is about 20% of unit sales. What does that mean you ask? It means that every single department at InBev had a collective “code brown” moment last week as they attempted to understand the impact of this transition to failure.

It’s only been a week, but if the trend holds, there’s at a couple billion dollars sloshing around the global beer market looking for a new home. I’m not too much of a beer drinker as of late, but the free marketer inside me hopes to see the little guys grab some of that share. If you’re looking for heterosexual endorsements from me, I’m throwing my support behind Yuengling Beer which is a delightful family owned and operated brewery in Pennsylvania. Yes, I hope the even smaller independents also reap the revenue results of InBev’s stupidity, but Yuengling has the scale and story to make a meteoric market gain here. If Yuengling is currently sold out, my back-ups are Genesee and Pabst respectfully.

P.T. Parnum: There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Alissa Heinersheid: Hold my beer