How Not to Handle an Inclusive Marketing Campaign

Brands are in a constant struggle for relevancy. 

As times change and demographics evolve, companies must find new ways to retain their existing consumer base while also expanding their reach to new consumers. With gen z displacing millennials as the demographic to market to, brands have begun taking strident measures to curry favour with a new generation of consumers.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020, which saw young people globally take to the streets to protest police brutality and racial prejudice, gen z has, very generally, become the social progress generation. Brands have responded by releasing marketing centred around messages of inclusivity and societal improvement to varying degrees of success.

Back in early April of this year, Bud Light attempted to jump on this trend of socially conscious advertising. To say the brand has had a rough year as a result of it would be an understatement. 

Bud Light’s decision to tap transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote the brand’s ‘Easy Carry Contest’ couldn’t have gone much worse. The American beer institution has been in a tailspin, with revenue plummeting 10.5% and the brand falling from its spot atop the US beer market for the first time in over two decades. 

Boycotts from conservatives and members of anti-trans groups quickly gained mass attention as social media networks were flooded with consumers disavowing the brand and, perhaps most famously, videos of disgruntled Bud Light drinkers firing guns at cases of the beer in protest of the partnership. 

On paper, recruiting a social media influencer to promote a product declining in popularity among young consumers seems like a foolproof way to subvert brand expectations and earn a couple of younger customers in the process. Unfortunately for Bud Light, gen z’s attitude toward beer, and alcohol generally for that matter, is one of indifference at the moment. Young drinkers would more likely grab a spiked seltzer or abstain from drinking entirely than reach for a big-name light beer. 

It’s commendable that in a time characterised by immense polarisation among people, a brand wants to send the message that everyone, regardless of their interests or identities, should be able to grab a brew and have a good time with each other. Unfortunately for Bud Light, with sales falling and few new consumers coming to the brand, it’s difficult to think of anything that this partnership achieved aside from throwing fuel on the flames of the already incendiary LGBTQ+ moral panic in US political discourse. 

There is plenty of criticism that can be directed towards Bud Light, not because it gave in to the “woke mob” and presented audiences with a trans spokesperson, but because it underestimated how a dramatic shift in its brand messaging would alienate the demographic it had spent decades cultivating while also coming off as insincere to the demographic they were attempting to market to. 

Bud Light’s ads have always presented its product as the beverage of choice for the sports-watching, good-timing, everyman, often with a healthy serving of humour and satire. Bud Light’s own “party animal,” the bull terrier Spuds McKenzie, was fawned over by bikini-clad women in their campaigns from the late ‘80s, and the ‘Real Men of Genius’ TV and radio spots from a decade later lampooned the often-eccentric traits, likes and behaviours of the modern American male. Those campaigns were entertaining and memorable as well as effective at selling the product, but no doubt created with a heterosexual male audience in mind and, evidently, a socially conservative one as well. 

Suffice to say the Mulvaney partnership was a jarring departure from those campaigns and even from Bud Light’s contemporary spots, such as the ‘Dilly Dilly’ campaign that ran from 2017 to 2018 and the ‘Easy to Drink’ ad that ran during Super Bowl LVII, which feature humour reminiscent of the brand’s older advertisements but better suited to the sentiments of a diverse 21st-century audience. 

The Instagram post that sparked the outrage is innocuous and features humour, much like Bud Light’s past campaigns. Mulvaney, dressed like Holly Golightly from ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, jokes about her lack of sports knowledge, saying that the March Madness – a collegiate basketball tournament – she initially confused for mass hysteria is still cause for celebration. 

Considering the audience Bud Light’s marketing team had previously spoken to for decades, it’s understandable why a campaign with a trans person who doesn’t like sports might not go over well. Frustratingly for Bud Light’s parent company, AB InBev, the campaign didn’t send younger drinkers scrambling to their local ABC store for a 24-pack either. 

This brings up the ever-growing issue of tokenism. It can be easy for brands to cloak themselves in the iconography of popular political causes and convince themselves that it will increase their favourability among a more youthful customer demographic. But as we’ve seen with the still unfolding fallout from the Mulvaney partnership, political solidarity alone won’t win you consumers. 

Young consumers, now more than ever, are sceptical about the motives of the brands advertising to them. Gen z realises that companies have at least a superficial understanding of the interests of the age demographics they market to. They also know that companies will use that limited knowledge to try courting their support with targeted messaging that is oftentimes not indicative of the actual values of the company disseminating them. 

While the representation of minorities and sentimental messages of inclusion are appealing to consumers, recent research commissioned by the Gay Times and ad agency Karmarama found that 72% of the LGBTQ+ population considers its depiction in advertising as insincere and performative. 

AB InBev had an opportunity to save face and take ownership of its marketing decisions and company values. The company instead backpedaled, distributing a letter to wholesalers dismissing the partnership as an informal promotion and claiming that they “did not intend to create controversy or make a political statement.” Mulvaney also asserted in a later TikTok post that after the initial uproar caused by the partnership, Bud Light “turned a blind eye” to her, leaving Mulvaney to fend off “more bullying and transphobia than [she] could have ever imagined” while the brand performed damage control. 

One thing is sure: if Bud Light was legitimately invested in LGBTQ+ interests beyond their marketing, then the brand's actions since have indicated the contrary. 

By and large, Bud Light’s losses are just a drop in the bucket for AB InBev, which still holds claim to three of the top four most consumed beer brands in the US, Bud Light included. There’s no doubt that brands will continue putting forward campaigns like the partnership between Bud Light and Mulvaney. If this continues to be the trajectory of the marketing industry, then ethical consumers can only hope that brands will follow the example of Gillette with their ‘The Best a Man Can Be’ campaign and take ownership of the messages they disseminate while championing the causes they claim to support. 

Perhaps the biggest lesson that can be learned from this whole fiasco is that inclusive marketing, although well-intentioned, is sometimes ineffective at achieving its desired result and may instead exacerbate the political polarisation it was meant to counter. For this kind of messaging to work, companies must be willing to stick to the beliefs they publicise and understand the demographics they appeal to well enough to avoid alienating them.