You got a few important details wrong about the Bud Light fiasco
Rather, the mechanism is supposed to be that too much wokeness will alienate the demographics that you're trying to get money from. Sometimes, there's considerable overlap - the Bud Lite debacle, for instance. They came up with a woke ad campaign that alienated their target demographic,
It was one social media post. A single one. not a full ad campaign. And it was only viewable to people already following Dylan Mulvaney since it was her social media account, not Bud Light's.
and didn't bring in a new customer base to replace it.
Ya, the campaign probably wouldn't have brought i na ton of new customers, but their public back pedaling set fire to any hope they had of expanding.
So, they lost money - "go woke, go broke".
It is way more complicated than that.
First of all, that entire type of beer has been losing market share. Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite, etc are just not as popular with younger people. They either want better beers or they just jump to hard seltzer. Sure, Coors and Miller gained what Bud lost, but it is still a dwindling market. Look at what beer replaced Bud Light as the #2 selling beer. Modelo Especial. While not a great beer by any strtch, it certainly wasn't what you would have expected to beat out Coors Light and Miller Lite.
Second, executives saw this happening and made an attempt to reach out to a younger audience. You can argue about the execution, but they were actually trying to expand their audience, not alienate part of it.
Third, it became a controversy because the Republican base was goaded into it by Republican operatives. Not extremists. These people share the stage with party leaders in the GQP. Let's not pretend that this is not the modern Republican party.
It is really like the James Gunn "controversy". A Republican operative dug up some old jokes he made in poor taste and got a bunch of howler monkeys on Twitter to attack Disney and get the media's attention.
Fourth, while they did see a big drop off from earlier this year, Bud Light's revenue is actually up from this time in 2022. We have no real idea what caused the drop off. It may have already been happening and the Dylan Mulvaney single post was an attempt to mitigate it.
That's all speculation, of course. The important thing is, "go woke, go broke" isn't about pissing off the right-wing extremists. It's about pissing off your actual customer base, whoever that might be.
It is completely driven by Republican operatives. That is why it is so selective and inconsistent in its outrage.
