Keep in mind this truth. These people didn’t stop drinking beer; they just stopped drinking Bud Light. Market forces continue to work. There are winners and losers, and the Anheuser Busch folks, after slitting their wrists, are looking for a way to stop the bleeding.
First, there’s no evidence they’ve learned anything from that experience despite costing an estimated 27 billion in market cap (so far) as they instead play the look who you are hurting card.
On an earnings call last month, Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Michel Doukeris gestured to the stain the boycott has placed on distributors and salespeople.
‘This situation has impacted our people and especially our frontline workers: The delivery drivers, sales representatives, our wholesalers, Bud owners and servers,’ he said.
‘These people are the fabric of our business. They are our neighbors, family members, and friends. They are in every community in America. We’ve been doing everything we can to support our teams.’
Do you know who else are our neighbors, family members, and friends? The people who are drinking someone else’s beer because a half-cocked marketing VP thought using a fake woman to promote fake beer was a good idea. We’ll grow the customer base, she said.
Not so much. But some of these threads in your fabric will begin migrating toward beers with growing demand, and that’s BUD’s real problem. Budweiser doesn’t exactly own the distribution network. If these folks fold up or move on, AB won’t have the infrastructure to move beer people might still want to drink. That’s not a problem they can quickly solve in a boardroom somewhere, especially with the damage the brand has suffered in the past two months.
They’d like to avoid a messy divorce, so maybe an appeal to the heart of America will work.
‘These people are our neighbors, family members and friends. They are in every community in America. As we move forward, we will continue doing everything we can to support our teams while working tirelessly to do what we do best – bringing people together over a beer.’
Hey, America, if you don’t buy a Bud, these folks will be out of luck. Will they? Is the demise of the brand or your business going to stop bringing people together over a beer or just a cheap, not terribly tasty beer?
Creative destruction works, and you just don’t like the idea of it working on you, so you are not afraid to use a bit of guilt to pull your #woke ass out of a fire you set yourselves.
But if it comes to that, these folks can always learn to code, right?
HT | The Conservative Treehouse
