As someone who has never drunk more than a mouthful of “light” beer (true story: I tasted a Lite when I first arrived here, didn’t finish the drink, and never touched another of the type ever again), the brouhaha surrounding Bud Light’s marketing decision to elevate some girlyboy to be the brand spokesman has left me totally unmoved — well, apart from bursting out in derisive laughter, that is.
I don’t have a sexy MBA from some elite academic institution, so I’m hardly one to judge this latest example of woke stupidity [redundancy alert]. Nevertheless, here are some core principles I’ve discovered along the way, in a career that spanned over three decades of marketing and advertising.
Marketing Rule #1: You never neglect (never mind alienate) your existing customer base. They are the ones who pay your salaries and keep your production lines moving.
Marketing Rule #2: Once your brand is established, you never chase after “new” customers, but concentrate on getting your existing customers to use your product more. This is both intuitive and cost-effective, except perhaps to an inexperienced person with a sexy MBA from some elite academic institution.
Marketing Rule #3: You never make radical changes to your marketing or advertising strategy, especially when it comes into direct conflict with the philosophy of the first two rules.
Marketing Rule #4: You never let the latest “thing” drive changes to your marketing strategy, especially if that latest “thing” conflicts directly with your brand’s core principle (Unique Selling Proposition, ethos, whatever) and customer base.
And for senior management: if anyone in your marketing structure — executives, ad agency, promotion company, whatever — suggests anything that flies in the face of the above four principles, fire them immediately before they get to make those changes.
Understand that they’re not being fired for making a mistake. They’re being fired for deliberately ignoring the canon of the marketplace.
They shit the bed with hiring the whatsit that implemented the idiocy now unfolding.
What grabs my attention is the lack of immediate reaction from the board of the corporate holding company. That in itself is very telling. Your rules are the foundation of all brand management and they are apparently nowhere to be seen.
I wonder what percentage of their shares are owned by Black Rock?
Apparently, they are no longer teaching the ” New Coke ” case study because ” certainly everybody with even a passing interest in Marketing knows that case by heart’. But the new generations didn’t live though that fiasco, so it’s necessary to do their own clusterf#ck version.
Ambev is a piece of shit company. My family is from the Saint Louis area, and the Busch family did a LOT of good things for STL (the STL Zoo is one of the top 5 zoos in the world (or was at one point not to long ago) and it was funded for *decades* by the Busch family, last time I went there (a decade ago) was still free to get in.
Then they sold out to Ambev.
Ambev dropped in market cap from 132B to 128B in about 2 weeks. I bet they slide another 6 or 8 billion.
Which won’t hurt the execs at all. But at the same time they’ve signaled to their friends and associates that they put “social justice” above profit.
https://www.ab-inbev.com/our-brands/
I can’t drink much anymore, so when I do I don’t waste it on crappy beer.
Just remember, the people in charge don’t really give a shit if Bud Light dies. They don’t care about the people who sell A-B products, or who make a living somewhere in the A-B supply chain. The people in charge only care about signaling their virtue and their adherence to the narrative to other members of the “elite”, who will in turn reward them and ensure their “elite” status when whatever company they’re running into the ground crashes and burns. I’ve seen it in Seattle, I’ve seen it in the military, and I’m seeing it all over the USA. Fuck up to move up. Never actually suffering the consequences of their actions, leaving one failed organization after another in their wake, while being coddled and protected by their connections in the “elite” social circle who all went to the right schools and who all know the right people and all spout the same retarded bullshit. It shouldn’t shock anyone that the woman in charge of burning A-B’s money into ash is a Harvard grad. Whatever Harvard used to be, it’s no longer about intelligence or being the best, it’s about connections. And I’m willing to bet that the horse-faced woke hag who pushed the Mulvaney bullshit got her job through those same connections.
Fuck it. Burn it all to the ground, and hopefully these people might actually feel some pain. I don’t drink Bud products anyways.
New Marketing Babe: We will increase our market share by becoming the beer of choice in the trans community. Demographics show we could increase sales by up to 0.4%
CEO: Brillant! Any down side?
New Marketing Babe: We will only lose the transphobic portion of our customer base and we don’t like them anyway.
Sales Manager talking on his phone to his wife: Honey, no sales bonus this year. Polish up my resume and send it to Yinglings for me.
You’re absolutely right Kim. Don’t need to an MBA to know this truth. I would say that you can deviate a little bit from #2 but not too far. For instance if you advertise in sporting journals or sporting events, increase the variety of sports you advertise with.
Terrapod, you’re absolutely right about heads not rolling. it should have happened within three days. A day to go “oh shit look what happened,” a day to plan corrective action and prepare any paperwork for termination of subcontractors, consultants and employees and one last day to execute the corrective plan.
The troubling thing that I heard is that these alphabet mafia types took a page out of Saul Alinsky’s extortion playbook and send letters to various companies making demands. Then these woke investment firms who have bought into this nonsense like Vanguard and Black Rock tell their borrowers that their investments will be turned off if they don’t adopt the demands of organizations such as the alphabet mafia.
The upshot is that Budweiser makes bad beer under many different brand names. I think I had one good Bud hears ago called Bud Select or something. it actually had some flavor. I think that beer lasted a year or two when it was ditched. Now on top of bad beer, they make bad business decisions. Buy local independent beer and you’ll get a better product and the money will stay within the community longer.
JQ
Naw, Bud Select was nasty garbage as well.
Better than Budweiser is a fairly low bar, after all. It’s not difficult to clear that and still be canoe love donkey piss.
“Better than Budweiser is a fairly low bar, after all.” Ain’t that the truth. I think the last Budweiser I drank was back in 1977 when it was the only American beer available at MCAS Iwakuni. I had one (may not have even finished it) and began drinking Japanese beers.
This pandering is invasive as pythons in the Florida Everglades. It’s hitting my small company now because our retiring no less HR director decided it was time to get “proactive” about INCLUSION.
Truth is in my case and AB’s case and all of this shit, is that I’d give you 1000 to 1 odds that ALL of these fuckwad decisions are made by women, men in board rooms don’t have time for this shit. For the life of me I do not understand most female’s affinity for fairies. It’s like they never grew out of wanting a doll to dress up, or a purse dog.
Never was an AB product drinker anyway, not for any moral reasons, it was always for some reason a headache in a can to me.
In business, the rule that matters the most was created over a hundred years ago by Clement Stone, “It’s easier to keep a customer than to gain a new one.”
It also seems reasonable that a corollary to these rules would be to never consider the brand yours. That is, the things you personally like or would like to see attached to the brand shouldn’t be considered especially when those preferences go against the aforementioned rules. As much as I don’t care for Bud Light, it is a powerhouse brand and one that merited a bit more respect than this woman gave it.
I’d normally suggest that maybe Hanlon’s Razor applies here but these days on the left malice and stupidity seem to be hell bent on laying waste to as many companies as possible.
The one time rule #2 does not apply is when you are in a dying market. If you make horse-drawn carriages and your competitor is sticking gasoline engines in their carriages, you can either imitate them – but try to do it better – or find an entirely different product and market.