Bud Light Crisis: 4 Key Lessons for Brands to Manage Reputation

The recent Bud Light crisis has left us with some take-aways:

1- Brands should never underestimate the potential consequences of their actions given today’s social and political environment.

2- It is more important than ever to align your values with those of your customers.

3- Not all customers want the brands to change the world. Conservatives also expect their brands to stay loyal to their values.

4- Scapegoating is still a popular crisis management tool, even when it is not a real solution.

What happened?

Bud Light collaborated with TikTok trans activist Dylan Mulvaney on a brand partnership. They sent her a customized beer pack as part of an advertisement for the company’s March Madness contest and to commemorate a year since Mulvaney started to identify herself as a woman.

Anheuser-Busch, the parent firm of Bud Light, lost $5 billion in value when news of the partnership triggered countrywide calls to boycott the beverage.

As a result, Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light marketing vice president, is taking a leave of absence and will be replaced by Todd Allen, Budweiser global marketing vice president. In addition, the corporation has employed two consultants with expertise in Washington, D.C.’s conservative circles to advise the brand in the future.

Brands & Politics

In recent years, the world has become more polarized than ever, with political, social, and cultural divisions increasingly prevalent in many societies. This is attributed to various factors, including globalization, economic inequality, and the rise of social media.

As the world becomes more politically charged, it is becoming increasingly challenging for businesses to remain politically and socially neutral. Consumers are demanding that companies take a stand on issues that matter to them. They want to see businesses that reflect their beliefs and values and are actively working to improve society. They are scrutinizing brands’ every move, questioning their motives, and challenging their allegiances.

This pressure is coming from various sources, including employees who may be more likely to express their personal beliefs in company decisions. With social media and other internet platforms enabling individuals to share their ideas and beliefs more openly than ever before, employees may feel more empowered to speak out and encourage their employers to take a stance on social and political issues.

Of course, the use of social media adds on top of this tension build-up. No matter how much you want to stay impartial, your actions can be easily taken out of context, amplified, and used against your brand.

Consequently, it is getting harder for the companies and brands to stay away from political debates in today’s social and political climate and they should be aware that every decision and action count for their reputation.

Alignment of Values:

In his book “Marketing 3.0“, Philip Kotler introduced the values-driven marketing definition, which would be the marketing’s third era. He claimed that the future of marketing would lie in creating products, services, and company cultures that inspire, include, and reflect the values of target customers – and he was quite right about it.

Consumers prioritize the values of the brands they choose to support because they view their purchases as an expression of their identity and values. For example, environmentally conscious consumers may prefer to buy from companies that prioritize sustainability, while others may choose companies that support social causes that align with their beliefs, such as LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, or animal welfare.

It is crucial for brands to take a stance on social and political issues that matter to their customers. Brands that fail to do so may lose their customer base or face public backlash. To avoid this, businesses must ensure that they listen to their customer base and that they have a strong sense of purpose and values that align with their target audience.

In our case, we can see an obvious mismatch between the Bud Light’s message by partnering with a trans activist and how Bud Light consumers view the world.

All wings in the game

So far, nothing seems too much of a news or surprise. However, there’s a twist when it comes to picking the “acceptable set of values and causes”. We had the belief that brands were expected to align with left-leaning values and causes, such as environmentalism, sustainability, social equality, pro-choice, animal rights, and more. It would be a safe strategy to support these causes, unless you are not perceived faking it. The consumers with the same values and causes would increase their affinity to your brand, whereas the others would not be impacted. In other words, challenging the status quo and making a “positive change in the world” was considered as the baseline in values-driven marketing. As long as brands appeared convincing to a left-of-center audience, there wouldn’t be any problems.

This misconception was also in line with the argument in this Forbes article How Politics Influences Branding:

“As a rule, consumers are most encouraged to purchase by left-leaning political positions although there are exceptions. 33% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that show support for pro-choice groups or the right to a legal abortion. 36% are less likely to purchase from a pro-life brand. Consumers with more right-leaning beliefs are more likely to ignore brands’ political or social positions.”

We saw that this fact is no longer valid. Both left- and right-leaning audiences care about how brands align with their values. Conservatives protested against Bud Light because the company partnered with a trans activist. This shift means that companies can’t blindly adopt trendy causes as their own, as doing so might contradict their existing customer base. Instead, they must understand and embrace the real DNA of their brand, including all stakeholders such as employees, customers, partners, and shareholders.

Scapegoating

Scapegoating is a response strategy used by organizations to transfer an organization’s guilt or fault to another target, preferably an individual (Coombs, 1995). The corporations can escape from crisis by focusing the negative allegations directly on the guilty employees.

Probably, it was not the best call from the Bud Light’s marketing team to collaborate with a trans activist. From purely business perspective, I think we established this: if this was some sort of a new strategy, wasn’t a very smart one. Ignoring your large customer base for the sake of a single marketing campaign does not make sense.

I can think of 2 valid scenarios ending up with this decision, and none of them necessitates firing a person publicly.

Scenario #1 – This was a part of their marketing strategy. Marketing VP defined or approved the strategy, so he/she is accountable. Then it is a low performance indicator, but not enough to fire someone. Even if it was, still you don’t fire a professional publicly because of a wrong business decision. (you do that for different cases like bribery, theft, fraud, insider trading, harassment etc.)

Scenario #2 – This was not a strategy at all, but a tactical or operational decision by some Marketing Manager, who thought it was a good idea based on a personal bias derived from his/her individual values. Then, VP can still be held accountable as the leader, but the problem might be about the culture and processes. So, firing the VP does not really help with that.

No matter what really happened in the backstage, scapegoating was just a means of calming the crowds as stated in its own definition.

Conclusion

All in all, here is what went wrong with Bud Light’s recent decisions:

• They underestimated the consequences of their influencer marketing campaign
• They did not know their customers. Or even worse, they did not take their main persona into equation in first place
• They just mimicked what other brands were doing with their social stance by assuming conservatives don’t react
• They panicked and applied scapegoating as the escape strategy whereas it is not the real solution

We know that Bud Light is not the first or last company to repeat these mistakes. However, maybe the next one will not be someone among us…