Media Backlash
I am going to be talking about what happens when a company has a PR scandal, what they do in the moment, and how they come back from it after the fact. I am going to be talking specifically about the Bud Light scandal in 2023, following their partnership with Dylan Mulvaney and how it created controversy. I will discuss the public backlash, the company’s response, and how I feel about it.
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In 2023, Bud Light decided to partner with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman. This created major backlash and was estimated to have cost Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, as much as $1.4 billion in lost sales that year. Bud Light was overtaken by Modelo as the top-selling beer in America following this controversy. The boycott continued to affect sales into 2024.
Why was this so controversial, and what made Bud Light lose sales? Well, at the time, transgender rights were already a major topic of political debate in America, and many conservative consumers viewed the partnership as Bud Light taking a political position on this issue. Some longtime customers felt that the company was moving away from its traditional American branding toward more liberal views. After this partnership, the company’s response made the situation much worse, though.
In June 2023, Mulvaney publicly said Bud Light had failed to contact her during the backlash over this partnership and instead stayed silent. With this, some of the people who originally supported Bud Light and its partnership with Mulvaney no longer supported the brand. This created a situation where Bud Light was receiving criticism from both sides, making it difficult for the company to recover its reputation either way.
I personally believe that this controversy was very overdramatic and blown out of proportion. We are living in a time when people have different beliefs, opinions, and values, and I think it is important to respect those differences. At the end of the day, Bud Light was simply partnering with an influencer to promote its product, something that companies do all the time. I don’t think a marketing partnership should have created such a huge controversy. However, I also believe that Bud Light could have handled the situation much better. Instead of staying silent, the company should have stood by its decision and supported the person it chose to partner with. By trying to avoid upsetting either side, Bud Light ended up upsetting both.
