Has Bud Light Bounced Back?

Bud Light might no longer be in the eye of a culture war storm, but while scrutiny has eased off the company in recent months, the brand has far from recovered from the boycott called in April by its conservative customers, according to experts.

While the controversy that followed the brand’s partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney is now several months in the past, Bud Light’s sales have struggled to pick up, with Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light’s parent company, reporting a 13.5 percent decline in third-quarter U.S. revenue per 100 liters, a key industry metric.

Anheuser-Busch, the world’s biggest brewer, said that sales to U.S. retailers dropped by nearly 17 percent “primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light,” CNN reported.

“Unfortunately, Bud Light’s campaign ‘faux pas’ is not yet in the rear view mirror,” entrepreneur Shama Hyder, the founder of Zen Media, an online marketing firm that serves clients around the world, told Newsweek.

“Sales have slumped and even their chief marketing officer [Benoit Garbe] stepped down recently,” she continued, adding that Bud Light’s woes contain a lesson for brands everywhere: know your audience and stay true to your brand voice.

On November 15, Anheuser-Busch said Garbe would be stepping down at the end of the year and would be replaced by Kyle Norrington, its U.S. chief commercial officer.

“The challenge is that Bud Light faltered and handled this crisis badly,” she said. “It’s going to take a lot of time for them to fully recover from this, especially given the choices consumers have today.

“Competitors are always nipping at their heels. Influencers matter and ‘de-influencing’ is more than a trend. Brands have to be much savvier than in the past.”

Following the controversy around the partnership with Mulvaney and the boycott called by conservatives across the country, Bud Light has lost its title as top-selling American beer to rival Modelo.

Newsweek contacted Anheuser-Busch for comment by email on Thursday.

Bump Williams Consulting, which closely followed the plunge in sales after the whole controversy around Bud Light earlier this year, has paused its weekly reporting on the beer brand as “there have been no notable deviations in the trends since the initial descent in April,” the company told Newsweek.

The consulting firm, which focuses on the beverage alcohol industry, added that while brands in the ABI [Anheuser-Busch InBev] portfolio like Michelob Ultra and Busch Light have somewhat recovered since their stumble in April, Bud Light’s declines have remained consistent in their magnitude.

“Certainly not getting any worse, but also not getting any better,” a spokesperson for the company said. Bump Williams Consulting is looking at April 2024 as a potential turning point “for any sort of recovery, although I do fear that a high percentage of consumers that have left the brand have indeed left the brand for good,” the spokesperson said.

There are signs, on the other hand, that Bud Light is getting out of the conservatives’ doghouse. Last week, rapper Kid Rock—who had helped incite the boycott against Bud Light—told Fox News that he “didn’t want to be in the party of cancel cultures and boycotts that ultimately hurt working-class people.”

“As a God-fearing man, as a Christian, I have to believe in forgiveness,” he said. “They made a mistake, all right. What do you want, hold their head under water and drown them and kill people’s jobs? I don’t want to do that.

“But I hope—at the same time, I don’t want to be their biggest cheerleader. I want them to show me something to get me back as a consumer, as a drinker.”

In April, Rock—whose real name is Robert Ritchie—filmed himself shooting a crate of Bud Light in protest to the brand’s partnership with Mulvaney.