Bud Light in 2023: one sponsored post, two audiences and an undeclared premise

On 1 April 2023 the influencer Dylan Mulvaney posted a sponsored Instagram video for Bud Light, including a personalised can the brand had sent to mark her first year since coming out as a transgender woman. Within days the post had become a national political story in the United States. Prominent conservative figures called for a boycott, and some filmed themselves disposing of the beer. On 14 April Anheuser-Busch’s US chief executive, Brendan Whitworth, issued a short statement saying the company “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people”, without mentioning the partnership. Two marketing executives, including Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, went on leave later that month.

The commercial effect was large and lasting. In the four weeks to 3 June 2023, Bud Light’s US retail sales were down about a quarter on the previous year, according to NielsenIQ data reported by Reuters, and in May Modelo Especial overtook it as the top-selling beer in US retail, a position Bud Light had held since 2001. Anheuser-Busch InBev reported that its US revenue fell 10.5% in the second quarter of 2023. At the end of June, Mulvaney said in a video that the brand had never reached out to her after the backlash.

A premise nobody had declared

In our method the premise is the first P of a value proposition: who the promise is for, who it is for less, and on what terms. Mass brands often avoid writing one, because a beer sold in every gas station seems to be for everyone. Bud Light had long been associated with a broad, mainstream and largely male American audience, and the company had spoken publicly about wanting to renew and widen that base. Both are legitimate goals. The difficulty is that the brand had not said, to its existing customers or to the new ones, what the change meant and on what terms the old relationship continued.

When a premise is left implicit, customers write it themselves. A large share of Bud Light’s core buyers read the partnership as a statement about who the brand was now for, and concluded it was no longer for them. Whether that reading was fair is a separate question. For the brand it was the reading that counted, because the drinkers who could switch to another lager with no effort decided the sales.

Spillover

The books name a specific risk for promises tuned to one channel: spillover, the leakage of a channel-specific promise toward audiences it was never designed for. The rule they give is blunt: different promises per channel work only when the audiences do not talk to each other. A sponsored post for an influencer’s followers is designed as a low-reach, high-affinity message. In 2023, with political media watching consumer brands closely, it was a high-leakage channel. A promise tuned for one audience travelled to another one that had never been asked, and it arrived carrying the brand’s name.

Spillover is a planning risk, and it can be assessed before anything is published. The questions are simple: who else will see this, what will they conclude about the brand, and is the company prepared to stand behind that conclusion?

The response chose neither side

The most expensive decisions came after the post. A brand under pressure has two coherent options. It can declare the premise, say whom the brand is for and accept the loss of those who reject it, or it can treat the partnership as a mistake and say so. Anheuser-Busch’s public response did neither in a way either audience could read. The statement avoided the subject, the executives’ leave suggested retreat to one side, and the creator said she felt abandoned. Customers who had boycotted had no reason to return, and customers who had welcomed the partnership had a reason to leave.

We read this from public reporting, and we do not know what the company weighed internally. The pattern is still instructive. Trust takes the minimum, and in a polarised moment an ambiguous answer is read by each side in its least favourable light.

Any brand that wants to reach a new audience while keeping an old one faces the same work: write the premise first, test where each message can leak, and decide in advance what the company will say if it does. That is upstream work, and it is the kind of reading we train your team to do before the campaign brief goes out.