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Culture war refresh. Many people are familiar with the Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney controversy. About a week afterwards people on this website noted there wasn’t a large impact on the stock price of InBev, Bud’s parent company,
Well, InBev is now down about 10% from when the whole Bud Light - Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship. Bud light revenue is still down materially. At the same time, other major alcohol companies appear flat or up materially. Therefore, it seems the boycott has had real negative impact on InBev.
Does this mark the start of the right finding it’s muscle or is this a dead cat bounce?
Light beer seems like the type of product that you would never switch once you've made a choice. Once you pick Bud Light in your early 20s, you just stick with it for the rest of your life. So it's a choice that people rarely re-examine and the brand benefits a lot from inertia. I don't think conservatives are going to be upset forever about Bud Light, but getting them to switch back seems like it will be an uphill battle.
It’s also something you order at restaurants and bars where you have a choice and the choice is publicly known. If I’m in a bar in Mississippi and I’m ordering a beer with my buddies, there’s an element of peer pressure. The controversy over Mulvaney means that especially in conservative circles, ordering a Bud Light is going to be something people pay attention to. It’s the tranny beer. You don’t support that do you?
And I think this is why a lot of boycotts fail. If you can privately cross the line, then a lot of people do. All the people who are concerned about Amazon abusing workers still order from them because the social pressure of potentially being seen ordering from Amazon isn’t there.
To be clear, a lot of the bud light drop in sales was through liquor stores and grocery retail.
The people who, for whatever reason, wanted to drink bud light, now buy something else to drink a six pack of at home where no one is watching.
I have no experience with this: are the contracts for bars and restaurants and other venues flexible enough to see sales drops in one month or less?
If the contracts are long term, you wouldn't see any drop in wholesale on AB's end until the contract is up, even if the consumers have stopped drinking it.
At bars/restaurants, a driver comes around once a week and restocks as necessary, entering the data on a handheld. So granular to weekly at the distributor level.
Most likely, sales data is sampled from a selection of retailers almost real-time and statisticified by paid analysts.
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Keeping in mind, I'm familiar with this second-hand due to family working for Miller at one point, which is a different company, but...
Local sales - to grocery stores, gas stations, and the like - are effectively handled by sales reps who manage them. Once stocked, the stock in question(IE, Beer) is basically one and done and can only be removed from the store in question by being sold.
So, thanks to this PR kerfuffle, you've got alot of beer that's basically sitting around in stores not doing anything that the stores in question can't get rid off and the sales reps can't replace with other things that would sell.
Plus, you've got local stores thinking to themselves 'Do I really want to deal with this?' when it comes time to see what's going to get prominence in their liquor area and who's going to get permission to do those stupid, big displays for when the game day comes along.
All these metrics are tracked by software. (And this was several years ago, keep in mind, who knows what they're doing now). If stores are under-performing, the head distribution offices know about it. Often times, what's stocked in choosen through a combination of the sales rep and what the local store manager allows. Which means this can get messed up and stores can under-perform very easily, because you've got stock sitting there no one wants to buy and you can't stock what's being sold more because you have limited shelf space you're allowed and this crap that won't move is just sitting there and you can't do anything with it...
I haven't talked to anyone in the business in a long time, but if I had to guess, there's alot of people that are very, very cranky right now.
So, to answer your question; Yes, I have a feeling they instantly saw a tank in sales and are quietly panicking, because the guys who've got skin in the game are probably screaming their heads off, from the sales reps to the distribution centers.
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