The chief executive of Anheuser-Busch InBev blamed social media misinformation for fueling a conservative consumer boycott of Bud Light after the top-selling U.S. beer was promoted by a transgender influencer.
Bud Light has become the goal of a fierce backlash since Dylan Mulvaney posted a video last month on Instagram, where he has 1.8 million followers, featuring a custom-made beer can supplied by the brewery that was emblazoned with an image of his face.
The right-wing boycott caused beer sales volumes to drop by a quarter, while two Bud Light executives took time off.
“People often talk about this topic in social media like noise”, managing director Michel Doukeris he told the Financial Times. “You have a fact and each person puts an opinion behind the fact. And then opinions start to get replicated fast on every single comment. By the time 10 or 20 people put a comment out there, reality is no longer what fact is, it’s more [about] what were the comments.
The comments by Doukeris, whose company also owns beer brands from Stella Artois to Corona, highlight the challenge faced by consumer goods companies with respect to their perceived association with controversial social issues.
Alissa Heinerscheid, VP of marketing at Bud Light and one of the pair now on leave, had previously described the brand’s traditional marketing as having “cranky, out-of-this-world humor” and promised to update it with “a campaign that’s truly inclusive.” .
Doukeris said that “misinformation and confusion” circulating online includes that Mulvaney can be understood as “a production can and every can would be like what it was in that post . . . We never intended to make it for production general and public sale.
Others, he said, thought it was a Bud Light campaign when it “wasn’t: it was a post. It wasn’t an advertisement.”
He complained that there were even videos of billboards with images of the Bud Light can inserted “electronically” and “10 million people [were] watching and commenting. . . He had nothing to do with Bud Light, it was just like pure social media creation.
The firestorm is affecting sales, which were already in a long-term decline. Bud Light sales volumes for the week to April 22, the most recent industry data available, were down 26 percent from a year ago, according to an analysis by Bump Williams Consulting based on Nielsen IQ data.
Doukeris said in an earnings call on Thursday that the brand’s U.S. sales decline in the first three weeks of April accounted for 1% of the brewer’s global volumes, but he refrained from commenting on its impact to the brewer’s business. whole year, stating that it was ‘too early to get the full picture’.
ABInBevFirst-quarter profits increased nearly 14% year-over-year, beating analyst expectations amid sustained demand even after price hikes. The group cited “a healthy combination of volume and price” as it maintained its medium-term earnings growth outlook at 4 to 8%.
“It looks like the worst is over in terms of declining volumes,” said Simon Hales, an analyst at Citi. “The question now is how quickly we can see a return to normal, or at least some improvement in that relative rate of decline.”
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