Boycott Not Stopping: Bud Light’s Situation Getting Worse as Time Goes On, Miller and Coors Triumph
Bud Light beer sales are plummeting weeks after the boycott against the beer began. It was April 1 when Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney was revealed. Since then, it has been downhill…
“The shocking deterioration of Bud Light Blue’s market share continued apace through the third week of April — and actually somehow worsened. We’ve never seen such a dramatic shift in national share in such a short period of time,” Beer Business Daily reported on its subscribers-only website, according to Barron’s.
So how bad is it? Sales were down 26.1 percent from 2022 for the week that ended April 29. Sales had been down 21.2 percent the week before.
The week before that, the sales decline over 2022 was 11 percent, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The Beer Business Daily report said that the results of three weeks were enough to pull sales for all of 2023 down 8 percent.
Coors Light sales were up 13.3 percent over 2022 in the third week of April. Miller Lite sales rose 13.6 percent, the report said.
Bump Williams, founder, president and CEO of Bump Williams Consulting, said Bud Light had $4.8 billion in sales in 2022, well ahead of second place Modelo Especial at $3.75 billion, according to the Post-Dispatch.
But with the decline growing and summer approaching, without a dramatic change, “Bud Light is in serious trouble this year. And I think it runs the risk of losing that No. 1 position at the end of calendar year 2023 to Modelo Especial,” Williams said.
Williams said Anheuser-Busch marketing vice president Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, who is currently on leave, made two mistakes. One was moving away from her core customer and the second was her tone.
“Her big miss was I don’t think she understood who the core Bud Light shopper was. When she came out with her comments, they were deemed as being derogatory, insulting and juvenile. And the Bud Light drinkers said ‘Enough of that,’” Williams said.
Williams was not upbeat on the company’s ability to recover.
“Right now their compass is completely broken. There’s no game plan,” he said.
In some places, the declines have been larger than the country as a whole.
In the New York City area, Bud Light sales at the grocery chain Stew Leonard’s are down 50 percent, according to the New York Post.
Meanwhile, Coors Light sales have jumped the same percentage, said Andrew Hollis, Stew Leonard’s director of grocery.
“Since the publicity over the transgender issue, we’ve seen Coors Light outselling Bud Light for the first time,” he said.
