"On June 3, Brayden King, a professor of management and organizations, gave an interview to CNBC calling the Bud Light boycott an outlier in the right's attack on "woke capitalism" because it is the first one to actually harm the company's sales. King studied 133 political boycotts from 1990 to 2005 and none of them accounted for more than a 1% drop in sales for a company; the Bud Light boycott had resulted in an estimated 18% drop in all AB InBev sales."
Bunch of rednecks and angry fundies boycott a higher cost department store/coffee shop… meh. The same people boycott $2/gal alcoholic piss water? Real shit
The thing is Budweiser caved pretty much immediately, which also led to allies boycotting! Dumbasses did the worst possible thing, fold to a decentralized demand and piss off everyone while not even ending the boycott from the first group because there was no one to tell them they won!
Interesting. I had assumed it went like the other 133 that source mentions.
Wonder if there's just an extremely over-sized overlap between conservatives who were going to be offended about and willing to boycott and people who drink cheap beer that led to that statistically unusual outcome.
Also maybe cheap beer is cheap beer and there's limited enough brand loyalty that other types of products don't?
"Although AB InBev did have to sell the U.S. distribution rights to Modelo to rival Constellation Brands as the result of an anti-trust suit in 2013, one could still make the argument that Anheuser-Busch still technically retains its top ranking since it still owns the Modelo brand."
I don't think there was any real strong attachment to it. It was a recognizable go-to cheap beer. But nowadays there's dozens of cheap light beers, and seltzers, and mixed drinks in a can, and ciders, and I can go on.
It was the fact that Bud Light openly advertised using a trans person. It was an image that could be flaunted and would rally even moderate republicans.
An executive respectfully writing a response detailing why they would not want their brand associated with a platform that had extreme right wing views is much harder to rally around…
Fundamentally it’s because there is no convenient image to rally behind… they would have to read and think to be outraged.
When they figure out how to use AI to generate picture book propaganda for their followers, watch out. (Wait, is that why they are obsessed with meme images...)