The Blog

2023-

2023-04-23 c
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION III
(Bud Light entry)

BOYCOTTS WORK.
QUEER BEER (BUD LIGHT) MIGHT NEVER RECOVER.
Might the elites learn a lesson?
NO.

BREAKING: Bud Light VP of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid has taken a leave of absence amid backlash from the Dylan Mulvaney controversy

https://t.co/uLpxl1T7wl

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 22, 2023

Bud Light doubles down with new billboards further insulting its ex-drinkers. pic.twitter.com/E3QiDOBds9

— Paul Hookem (@PaulHook_em) April 21, 2023

White House Press Secretary calls criticism of Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light Campaign “Violence”

pic.twitter.com/DzAFhJB454

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 21, 2023

This interview was recorded 8 days ago before they “apologized”. Bud Light knew exactly what they were doing with the Dylan Mulvaney campaign.

They don’t care about their customers. They were trying to win marketing awards.

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) April 22, 2023

Evidence mounts that the problems at Bud Light and its parent go far beyond Alissa Heinerscheid

If I were still teaching at Harvard Business School, I’d already be putting together material for a case study on the Bud Light marketing disaster, and I am reasonably sure that I would have plenty of company at HBS and elsewhere. The fiasco is already of historic proportions, joining New Coke as an example of failing to understand the customers of a brand.

But, as with any good case study, there are layers and layers of analysis possible, and the initial hypotheses of who and what went wrong may yield to alternative views once more information is considered.

With its choice of Alissa Heinerscheid to be VP of marketing for Bud, AB InBev made waves in the industry by entrusting its top-selling brand to the marketing skills of a woman. The company, it turns out, is the exact opposite of a stodgy, tradition-bound merchandiser of a product so venerable that the ancient Egyptians consumed it. Just last month, the company became the first in history to win the title “Creative Marketer of the Year” two years in a row at the world’s biggest ad festival, The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (formerly the International Advertising Festival) Marketer of the Year

16 March 2023

The world’s largest brewer is awarded for a second consecutive year, the only brand to achieve this in the history of the Festival.

Cannes Lions has announced that it will honour Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) as Creative Marketer of the Year for a second year in a row. The award recognises AB InBev’s sustained creative excellence that has driven sustainable business growth – as well as their body of Lion-winning work amassed over a sustained period of time, and reputation for producing brave creative and innovative marketing solutions.

AB InBev is the first brand in the Festival’s history to be honoured with the award for two consecutive years after embedding creativity at the heart of their business. (snip)

In 2018, AB InBev embarked on a journey to develop a creative excellence programme and set a five year strategic goal to improve their creative marketing capabilities and drive organic revenue for the business.

This programme saw them introduce an embedded, sustainable system and culture that put creative problem solving at the centre of their business – leading to organic growth and improved creative and financial performance. (snip)

[Lions CEO Simon]Cook added, “AB InBev’s commitment to creativity and the role it plays in business value creation is further supported by the clear buy-in from the company board, including CEO Michel Doukeris, which has been critical to their success. They’ve also scaled, using the best practice established in the US as a blueprint for their approach across other markets. All of this has delivered incredible business results, and the fact that they now use the number and breadth of Lion wins as a core measure of success shows just how powerful creativity is in driving progress.”

So, when Ms. Heinerscheid made her now-infamous video scoffing at the “fratty” tendencies of existing Bud Light drinkers, she could well have understood that her mandate was to get creative about finding new ways to reach other consumer segments for a brand that all acknowledged was in long term decline.

Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s VP of Marketing, doubles down on her extreme woke strategy to promote the “declining” American beer brand to “young people”, while smearing her former customers as “fratty and out of touch”.

How’s that working out for you, lady? @budlight pic.twitter.com/zNYKbMnZnu

— Old Row (@OldRowOfficial) April 9, 2023

There is no evidence that anyone in the company found anything she said there objectionable. Just over a week before the company half-heartedly “apologized” (sort of) for the Mulvaney tangent, The man who just replaced Heinerscheid was on CNBC kvelling over a remarkable award that must have pleased top management.

Bud Light’s VP of global marketing, Todd Allen, is very proud of Bud Light’s marketing strategy. pic.twitter.com/FRZ75RwXaM

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) April 22, 2023

A statement from the company in Beer Business Daily is a clear sign that the company recognizes it has problems that are organizational in nature:

Management Changes: Todd Allen Appointed VP Bud Light Former Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid, who was at that post for not quite a year, is off the brand. We understand she has decided to take a leave of absence.

“Today, we communicated some next steps with our internal teams and wholesaler partners,” per A-B spokesperson. “First, we made it clear that the safety and welfare of our employees and our partners is our top priority. Second, Todd Allen is appointed Vice President of Bud Light reporting directly to Benoit Garbe, U.S. Chief Marketing Officer. Third, we have made some adjustments to streamline the structure of our marketing function to reduce layers so that our most senior marketers are more closely connected to every aspect of our brands activities. These steps will help us maintain focus on the things we do best: brewing great beer for all consumers, while always making a positive impact in our communities and on our country.” [emphasis added]

Streamlining structure and reducing layers sounds a lot like getting rid of people, perhaps, methinks, the people who hired Mulvaney and the other “influencers” the company says it has “hundreds” of. Closely connecting senior marketers to “every aspect our brands [sic] activities” sounds a lot like a rebuke to former VP Heinerscheid for letting a subordinate hire Mulvaney without considering the negative reaction from the fratty customer base, as I speculated had been the case in a blog I wrote yesterday.

In fact, hiring online “influencers” may be part of the vaunted “creativity” that has garnered the company such global respect. After all, online influencers probably are cheaper than celebrity endorsers for athletic shoes,and reach demographic slices that don’t watch TV sports as much as the traditional Bud Light consumers, who are declining in number every year.

Alissa Heinerscheid is not the disease, she’s a symptom. If she hadn’t made the condescending video presentation, she might have survived the imbroglio, but thanks to it, she is now forever the face of the disaster, and is seen as an antagonist by her former brand’s formerly loyal consumers. A-B InBev was besotted with its highly successful (until a couple of weeks ago) creative marketing efforts. She delegated (as capable managers do) some of her responsibilities to subordinates. Neither she nor her staff, however, had an inkling of the way their best customers would respond to a transsexual embodying the brand as an “influencer.”

The beer business is tough, with worldwide consumption stagnant to declining, and trends favoring microbreweries over global brands. Creative marketing as a counterforce is an understandable response. After all, in a declining market something new needs to be done if there is to be growth.

But the fundamentals of marketing, especially the imperative to know thy customer must never be forgotten. (read more)

It Knows We're Here to Kill It

The Bud Light discontinuity and an unprecedented tabloid deletion

In the span of seven years, our beloved mega corporations have become canvasses for far-left propaganda. Nike went against America, Gillette went against men, the NFL went gay, and Postmates’ launched a “bottoms menu” encouraging customers to heighten anal sex by ordering certain foods. These weren’t one offs. They were broadcasted to the public, seen by kids. Some people threatened boycotts, but normies shrugged it off. Just marketers trying to get attention, nothing to see here.

But then Bud Light put a Theater Kid on its iconic blue can. Just one step too far. The perfect humiliation. The ultimate symbol of the American working class painted over with a performative homosexual influencer. There was simply no capitalist explanation. In no world would gay elites and Brooklyn dog moms ever drink Bud Light, and no reasonable marketing person could think otherwise. Even my most centrist, reasonable, rational friends texted me. “Wow…I thought this was an April Fool’s joke…this is insane!” It will be remembered as a tipping point.

But while the can itself is the bigger and more distracting story, a smaller one reveals the importance of this moment. The Daily Mail published, then quietly took down, a tabloid article with paparazzi shots of the marketing executive behind the atrocity. No media sources, left or right, have covered the deletion. The Daily Mail said nothing about it, no retraction. It’s not the article’s existence that matters—there’s been others published about her, but none quite so demeaning. It’s that powerful people were so appalled by the yellow press treating a marketing executive as a public figure that they demanded a silent retraction.

The marketing person in question is Alissa Heinerscheid, née Gordon, a Harvard WASP (apparently they do still exist, and this is what they’re doing) with New York Times nuptials and an $7.5 million condo overlooking Central Park. She has not the slightest f**ing clue what a Bud Light-and-Parliaments liquid lunch feels like when taken at a tailgate, construction site, or par 3 golf course—surely 80%+ of use cases for this terrible “beer,” if you could even call it that anymore.

There’s just something about her. A TV-ready quality. That long face. Her gummy cackle. The way her bony fingers claw at the air as she describes, on a Zoom call, how Bud Light is “dead in the water” if she doesn’t take drastic steps to alienate all its customers. Is she hideous? Kinda hot? Impossible to tell. But the world could finally see what those of us unlucky enough to work in Big Marketing have seen for a long time. The Ivy League corporate harridan, “work wife” to the Hype Dad, and co-controller of “the narrative” we hear so much about.

I’ve been laboring under this archetype of a decade. A master of indirect communication, she sits quietly at the top of the food chain. Her weapons are sighs and frowns. Beige, ghostly figures—always pretty, but not that pretty, well-dressed, but not that well dressed. Elizabeth Holmes was one. The Away CEO who abused her employees was one. They surprise you with their vacantness; they always seem a bit melancholy, a bit sad to be talking to you, a tactic that makes employees want to please them. “Be kind!” they shout, as they strike you.

They absolutely hate me and everyone like me, first because any white man without the fey manners required in the Ivy League scares them, and second because meritocracy—actual meritocracy, not box-checking—terrifies them to their very core. Beyond their veil of performative tiredness, they don’t actually offer anything besides management, and any time they try to “do a thing,” you see what happens.

Sensing that Heinerscheid herself represented the rarely-seen face of an all-powerful hydra (which we barely knew existed before 2016, and which now seems to literally run the world), shameless tabloid Daily Mail sent paparazzi after her in Manhattan as she grabbed coffee and met friends in Central Park. The hit piece contained the kind of mean-spirited fact-finding usually reserved for disgraced celebrities and public enemies: the $7.5 million condo, unflattering photos of her looking frumpy and overweight in leggings, she was seen with her tony friend group “laughing and smiling despite the backlash the company is facing.”

Giving her the tabloid treatment presents something totally new and deeply populist. Paparazzi exposing a propaganda minister. Putting her picture in the paper was one thing…but following her to her $7.5 million home? That cut too near the bone. No matter if her propaganda follows us to our homes every single day. The media establishment usually protects such individuals, because it is such individuals. So quickly, quietly, the article disappeared (although a version of it is still discoverable here, and thanks to Good Citizen for digging this up).

We’re left to speculate on the reasons—threats of litigation? Nepotistic negotiations? Payoffs?—we don’t know. But the deletion and the total media silence reminds me of the time I published an "LA’s Worst Landlords" list in Curbed. It was deleted within 48 hours due to legal threats from inside LA’s real-estate-centric power structure. Curbed never commented on it and no other publication carried the story, I assume, out of fear. When you really draw blood, they don’t stage a show about it. They hide it as best they can.

A friend tells me it’s all a game of “dinner party politics.” The globo-Belgian owner of Bud Light, AB InBev, has a new office in Chelsea, flooding the corners of Manhattan with yet more marketers. The marketing bourgeois view themselves as frustrated artists, but real artists (the sons and daughters of the actual elite) don’t want these dorks at their parties. Indeed, I’ve never met so many hardcore DSA-type communists as in advertising; good-looking beard-and-glasses bros with flabby bellies and cute little hedgehog faces poking out from behind the mess. The account women are natural social climbers who will shoulder their way into this show or that party, dipping their proboscises into that sweet social nectar; triumphant in Monday’s snack sessions. The theory goes: these groups compete with each other for New York Times-adjacent cool points, now solely conferred via acts of self-flagellation by the white cis ruling class, nobles scrambling to demonstrate devotion to the king’s new religion.

Social-competition may very well have given birth to the trans can. Heinerscheid may really have meant to “update” a “sinking” brand (AKA the most popular beer in America) the only way she knew how. She just didn’t know how, having been taught at Harvard no real skills. What we’re seeing may be less conspiracy and more rot.

Bud Light’s non-apology over the matter shows just what a precarious position the organization is in. Not because of any boycott; the whole notion of “Go Woke, Go Broke,” is cope, with #BoycottGillette and #JustBurnIt causing temporary dips in stock price; the offending mega corps buy low, then profit when the price rises back up a few months later. The revenue they lose in the meantime? Just a drop in the bucket for a global conglomerate. If Go Woke, Go Broke meant anything, Nike wouldn’t have also emblazoned itself with the same Theater Kid as Bud Light (I’m not gonna link to it).

AB InBev’s precarious position comes from the fact that it can’t fire Heinerscheid. It can’t apologize. It can’t rededicate itself to the American working class, that deplorable mass of Christian bigots. Global brands are now unable to purge themselves of weak links, insofar as they forward the correct ideologies. This is classical Communism—there is no good or bad performance, only good or bad people, and no good Party Member can be held accountable. “Four legs good, two legs bad.” (read more)

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