The response by Miller Lite to accusations of “going woke” with a recent advertising campaign “could not be more different” to the way Bud Light has handled its own controversy, a leading brand strategist has said.
Kelly O’Keefe, founding partner of Brand Federation, who has advised companies including Capital One, Walmart and UPS, told Newsweek that Bud Light’s reaction had only exacerbated the controversy surrounding the brand, while Miller Lite’s defense would see “very little pushback.” He predicted: “A year from now, you’ll see Miller Lite doing far better than Bud Light is.”
Miller Lite is the latest beverage brand to face calls for a boycott by conservatives on social media, who took issue this week with an ad—first announced in March—that celebrated women’s historic role in beer brewing for Women’s History Month.
The company said that the beer industry had “alienated the very people who helped create it” with “outdated” and “sexist” advertising, including some that the company produced in the past. The commercial depicts comedian Ilana Glazer dropping a Miller Lite poster featuring a scantily clad woman into a garbage can.
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“Miller Lite’s campaign preceded Bud Light’s, so it’s obviously not a reaction to Bud Light’s, but the difference is the contrast in the way the organizations have responded to some pushback could not be more different,” O’Keefe told Newsweek.
“Bud Light and their leadership—including all the way up to CEO Brendan Whitworth—made a tragic mistake, I think, trying to keep a hand in both sides and failing miserably at that,” he added.
Bud Light and its parent company Anheuser-Busch, of which Whitworth is the U.S. CEO, have been facing a backlash since early April after the beer brand sent a commemorative can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to celebrate her first year of transitioning to a woman.
While experts have said such campaigns provide an opportunity for brands to appeal to consumers in new markets, critics have accused companies of alienating their traditional customer base. Some LGBTQ+ campaigners have also criticized the company for not defending its ties with Mulvaney.
The partnership with Mulvaney drew public displays of anger. Musician Kid Rock took a gun to several cases of Bud Light in a viral video, while a Republican state senator in Missouri posted a video of himself smashing a can with a baseball bat outside his state’s Capitol building.
In the six weeks since, amid rapidly declining sales, the company has largely remained silent, made thinly-veiled attempts to appeal to conservatives and placed two of their top marketing executives on leave—which have been described as “knee-jerk” reactions by a marketing strategist previously.
On April 14, Whitworth issued a statement, saying: “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
O’Keefe said these moves “did not stop the bleeding” and “only contributed to bleeding on all sides of the argument.”
“They could have stood up above the political division represented in this, and taken a stand on a more humanistic level, and I think the fallout would have been much shallower,” he said.
“I think it would have been easy to say: ‘Look, we celebrate Kid Rock’s right to drink whatever he wants to drink; we encourage him to keep buying cases of our product to blast with his shotgun because it actually sells more beer—but we’re not going to change our values based on the views of a few individuals. And we believe everybody has the right to have a cold Budweiser in their hand if they wish to.’ It’s a simple way to steer away from controversy,” O’Keefe added.
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He argued that the removal of two marketing executives over the controversy was an “extreme maneuver” and “one that will come back to haunt them.” Due to Anheuser-Busch’s handling of the outrage, O’Keefe speculated, “it would not surprise me to see Whitworth out of that company over time.”
Newsweek approached Anheuser-Busch via email for comment on Thursday.
The branding expert contrasted this response to that of Miller Lite’s parent company, Molson Coors, which said categorically it would not place Elizabeth Hitch, the marketing director who championed the Women’s History Month campaign, on leave.
On Tuesday, Adam Collins, chief communications and corporate affairs officer of Molson Coors, told Newsweek: “People can take issue with our ads or our brands, but we won’t stand by as people personally attack our employees—especially given that these are company decisions, and are never made by one single person.”
“What we saw [with] Miller Lite, and especially Adam Collins, was rightly defend Elizabeth Hitch and her work to create advertising that—shocker of all shockers—celebrates women, and their role in beer making in history during a national women’s month,” O’Keefe remarked. “So I think the responses have been markedly different, and I think the result will be significantly different.
“I would expect Miller Lite to have very little pushback from this. I think they rightly identify that it was a fringe amount of people complaining about it.”
Arguably, though, women constitute a much wider group of consumers to target than transgender people, and are the subject of far less controversy than the culture wars rhetoric being leveled at the trans community at present.
O’Keefe noted that women are “by no means a fringe group, but they have historically been represented poorly, as the Miller Lite advertising campaign brings out.” He added that while that was true, “the fundamentals are the same in both cases.”
Both Bud Light and Miller Lite could be construed as abandoning their brand identity over the marketing moves, but O’Keefe described Miller Lite’s campaign as “astute” by seeing “an opportunity for growth by broadening the customer base.”
“They’re recognizing that consumer sentiment is changing, and they’re also recognizing that a male-only audience creates limitations for growth,” he said. A food branding expert previously said Bud Light’s partnership with Mulvaney may have been a bid to push into global emerging markets.
Much of Bud Light’s decline in sales in April has been absorbed by its competitors, including Miller Lite, which saw an increase in sales volumes in the four weeks to April 29 of 19.1 percent, while Bud Light’s fell 17.2 percent in the same period.
Do they now risk losing that competitive advantage? O’Keefe thought that edge “will hold steady” and the backlash would be milder—partly because “there aren’t a lot of people who want to stand against women in today’s world,” but also “because when you stand your ground in situations like this, you gain a respect even if you lose a few.”