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I must confess that I am baffled by the sentiment I see being expressed by yourself @Tarnstellung @Folamh3 and others that the response is somehow "disproportionate".
The Bud Light's VP of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid had previously described Budweiser as "a brand in decline" and had stated that she wanted to distance the brand from its perceived "frat-boy" and "older working class white male" customer base to pursue a younger, hipper, "more inclusive" audience. From the looks of things her efforts were massively successful so why is she being placed on administrative leave instead of receiving a well-deserved round of high-fives, and a 6-figure bonus?
To my eyes answer seems simple, as much as upper-class urban professional types like to talk about elite theory, shareholder capitalism, and how culture is downstream of politics, the bottom-line is one of those things you can ignore right up to the moment you can't, and you can't piss off your core customer base without effecting your bottom line. The beer business is not like the banking business or the venture capital business the cost of switching from the perspective of individual customers is low and the industry itself is heavily dependent on local bottlers/distributors, if even a small fraction of them decide to cut ties or raise rates in responses this can have a significant downstream effect on a brand's profitability.
This is not Anheuser Busch making "a mistake", or conservatives pouncing on some naive interns' minor screw-up/faux pas, this is a senior executive executing a stupid self-destructive plan with competence, elan, and complete success, only to be surprised to discover that shooting yourself in the foot results in a bloody mess. Even if you're broadly sympathetic to the LBGTQ+ cause this is absolutely 100% the sort of fuck up that an executive should get fired for.
The part that raises it to true malfeasance was that they chose to do it mere days after a Trans mass shooter had killed a bunch of kids at a Christian school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
Basically, most companies know way, way better than to come anywhere near a controversial matter in the wake of a serious tragedy. In almost any other case, this ad campaign would have been shelved for a month or more to avoid a politically contentious blowback. Or possibly cancelled altogether as it might seem to be bad taste.
But nope, they decided to poke the wound while it was fresh.
I'm going to join the (small) chorus saying that I genuinely don't think the Nashville shooting was on anyone's mind when Mulvaneygate started, the Bud Light controversy was definitely its own vein of outrage and wasn't tapping that prior thing. Maybe for some, it was indeed another straw on the herniated camel's back, but I will say that it definitely feels like its own thing.
It was certainly on people's minds, it had had been the single biggest news story of that week until Trump's indictment was handed down.
So I'm suggesting there's a connection even if it spun off to become its own thing.
Likewise, the three expelled legislators and their plight became it's own thing, although it also spun off the event.
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