Anheuser-Busch has a limited time to repair its image before it starts losing shelf space and market share.
Key Details
- In a recent interview with the Daily Mail, former Budweiser president of sales and distribution Anson Frericks argued that Bud Light only has a few months to undo the demand it did to its brand.
- The 24.3% year-to-year sales drop threatens to wipe out the brand’s market share, with retail space set to be relegated to other beer brands in stores.
- Retail stores generally reset their shelf space in the spring and fall, which means Bud Light has until September to improve sales.
- Rival brands—including Coors Lite, Yuengling, and Modelo Especial—stand to pick up Bud Light’s market share.
- Frericks also spoke on last Friday’s episode of Jesse Waters Primetime, discussing blaming asset managers for the recent push of DEI, ESG, and “woke” content.
Why It’s Important
Anheuser-Busch has experienced seven weeks of continuous declining sales for its products like Bud Light since transgender activist and influencer Dylan Mulvaney did a brief Instagram video on April 1 promoting a sports event for the beer brand and having their face depicted on the sides of several cans. Conservative activists scathed the promotion as a betrayal of the core audience for Bud Light and an attempt to shift the audience away from lower-class Americans and “frat boy” sensibilities towards young progressive beer drinkers.
As we previously reported, Bud Light failed to know and understand its audience, preferring to seek out a more politically palatable and lucrative audience while phasing out its previous consumer base at a tremendous cost.
The consumer backlash became the first of an aggressive series of boycotts—similarly against stores like Target—that have resulted in multiple corporations suffering multi-billion dollar losses due to “going woke.” Anheuser-Busch’s stock has decreased 17.9% since April 1. It remains unclear what marketing steps Anheuser-Busch can or should make to repair the brand in the coming months, although it will not likely be totally removed from stores and merely relegated to less shelf space.
“Anheuser-Bush needs to figure out a strategy; it needs to make a statement about who their customers are and who they’re going to serve now and try and regain those customers now in June and July because, by the time it’s August, September, it’s too late,” says Frericks.