Budweiser has been facing backlash after Bud Light partnered with Dylan Mulvaney, a social media influencer and transgender woman. The brand has defended their partnership with Mulvaney while people continue to criticize them, with some calling for a boycott of the beer and some people shooting cans of it with assault rifles.
Will the controversy surrounding the company cause them financial damage? Sarah VanSlette, a professor of applied communications at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville, tells KMOX that the size of the beer’s parent company means that a bit of backlash may not hurt.
“When you think about the seven companies that trade in the Brewers category in the New York Stock Exchange, they have by far the largest market capitalization,” VanSlette said. “They have $113 billion worth of market cap while the other six in that same category put together just have a market cap of $148 billion. So I mean, they are 47% of the entire market of brewers, so it really speaks to how much they can withstand in terms of public scrutiny.”
But, she said, we don’t know how this will all pan out, and we won’t have answers until the end of the second quarter.
Recently, Bud Light’s VP Alissa Heinerschied said she brought Mulvaney on as a partner because she wanted the beer to have a campaign that was truly inclusive, and appealed to both men and women. VanSlette said that shift towards a more inclusive marketing strategy is increasingly common, and according to some studies is generally approved of among consumers.
She pointed to a 2022 study that GLAAD performed which found that 53% of Americans expect business leaders to be at the forefront of conversations about LGBTQ rights, and that 75% of Americans were comfortable seeing people from the LGBTQ community in ads.
“So people in the marketing space and companies as huge as AB InBev don't do these campaigns lightly,” she said. “They don't just pick somebody randomly and decide to throw something out there. They really do do their research on their market, on how this will affect their brand globally.”
Hear more from Sarah VanSlette on the controversy surrounding Budweiser and Dylan Mulvaney:
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