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Tag: Get woke go broke

  • Target Holds Emergency Meeting to Avoid ‘Bud Light Situation’ Over Kids’ LGBT Pride Merch

    Target Holds Emergency Meeting to Avoid ‘Bud Light Situation’ Over Kids’ LGBT Pride Merch

    (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

     Brittany Sheehan | RedState

    In response to consumer outrage and calls for boycotts prompted by social media influencer Kaylee Campbell Layton’s viral video revealing LGBT Pride clothing including “tuck” swimwear for concealing male appendages in the children’s section, Target corporate held an emergency meeting for some of its southern locations.

    According to a Target insider, many stores have swiftly relocated their Pride sections within 36 hours after emergency calls were made on Friday, instructing managers and district senior directors to move mannequins and large signage from the front of the store to a smaller section towards the back. The call, which lasted approximately 15 minutes, primarily focused on ensuring team member safety and avoiding the need to defend Target against the backlash. Target Asset Protection and Corporate Security teams were present during the call.

    Monday, RedState reported that Target collaborated with a designer on its Pride line who insists that “Satan loves you.” 

    Merchandise includes Pride newborn onesies, swimwear that “thoughtfully fits on multiple body types and gender expressions”, including swimsuits that are labeled for a “light binding effect,” and bottoms labeled as “tuck friendly construction.” A spokesperson for Target claimed that the “extra crotch coverage” swimwear is only available in adult sizing. 

    https://twitter.com/thekayleec/status/1660315881900224512?

    Bathing suit merchandising displays are to replace the relocated Pride merchandise. The insider mentioned the decision was presented as an effort to boost swim sales.

    Target is aiming to prevent a situation similar to Bud Light’s recent backlash, after partnering with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The sustained Bud Light boycott resulted in major sales dives, a video of shuttered vendors at Fenway ballpark, a dismissed marketing director, and now they are buying back unsold cases of beer from wholesalers.

    Mulvaney’s partnership consisted of a beer can celebrating the influencer’s “365 days of girlhood,” and a hashtag #BudLightPartner. Mulvaney did a rendition of the Bud Light Super Bowl advertisement along with another clip carrying beers while dressed like Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” while pretending not to know what March Madness meant. While unpalatable for many conservatives and biological women, the Mulvaney antics pale in comparison to Target’s gay Pride children’s merchandising. Beer, after all, was never intended for children.  

    The impacted Target stores are located in South Carolina, Arkansas, and Georgia. Pride merchandise continues to be prominently showcased at other locations and on the Target website. 

    It is unclear if moving the products and signage will quell the calls for a boycott, as Target’s CEO Brian Cornell has spoken out on the Bud Light backlash, saying,

    I think those are just good business decisions, and it’s the right thing for society, and it’s a great thing for our brand.

    I’m no economics guru, but I’m certain that boycotts aren’t good for businesses. Conservatives have seen the impacts of a sustained boycott on Bud Light and will use wokenomics against Target, too. 

    Original Here

  • Bud light sales are cratering…along with other A/B beers

    Bud light sales are cratering…along with other A/B beers

    (AP Photo/Gene Puskar, File)

    DAVID STROM | HotAir

    Mainstream Republican leaders have asked conservatives to stop boycotting Bud Light because they contribute to Republican candidates and the Republican Party.

    You may be shocked to learn that even diktats from the top of the Party are being ignored by the man in the street. It’s almost as if we vote for Republicans because we don’t like being dictated to and prefer candidates who are supposed to protect our individual rights.

    Because of that fact, we are disinclined to sit down, shut up, and do what we are told. We aren’t Democrats, you know.

    Because conservatives tend to be individualists and we don’t generally like mixing our economic and political lives, we don’t tend to engage in boycotts. That, too, has been a tool that liberals use, and have used quite successfully to bully corporations into abject compliance with their agenda.

    But when Bud Light engaged Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesmodel and its Vice President explained that the company wanted to dump its current customers for a higher class of people, a funny thing happened: conservatives agreed to leave the beer for alternatives.

    Fine. Do you think we are “frat boys?” We’ll go elsewhere and you can become the Gen Z transgender beer. You wanted it, you got it.

    So despite the pleadings of the Establishment, conservatives have been leaving the brand in droves, and the informal boycott has created a “reverse halo” effect that is harming other Anheuser-Busch brands as well.

    Sales of Bud Light have been plunging since the company enlisted the help of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a marketing campaign a month ago.

    In the week that ended April 22, the brand’s in-store sales plummeted more than 26%, according to figures reported by Bump Williams Consulting, a Connecticut-based firm that specializes in the alcoholic beverage industry.

    And the decline is only accelerating. The week before, sales dropped by 21%. The week before that, it was 11%.

    Bud Light is still the bestselling beer in America by far, said Bump Williams, the founder, president and CEO of the agency that bears his name. In 2022, Anheuser-Busch InBev sold more than $4.8 billion worth of it in stores, he said, far outpacing Modelo Especial ($3.75 billion) and Michelob Ultra ($3.3 billion).

    But if the company can’t stop the decline in sales, especially as the peak beer-drinking summer season approaches, “then 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.

    Those numbers are stunning, both in their scale and because the sales losses are increasing, not decreasing.

    Rather than blowing over, the problem is snowballing and beginning to hurt other brands. Michelob Ultra, for instance, originally picked up some sales as a Bud Light alternative until people realized it, too, was an Anheuser-Busch product. So people switched again.

    During the controversy, sales have shot up for Bud Light’s biggest competitors, Miller Lite and Coors Light, Williams said. What is more, he is beginning to see what is known as a negative halo effect — other Anheuser-Busch brands are suffering because of the dispute.

    “I also think that what’s happening now is that anybody that is a Bud Light drinker and switches to Michelob Ultra because they don’t want to be seen holding a Bud Light, someone down the bar is going to say, ‘Hey, buddy, that’s an Anheuser-Busch product you’re holding,’” Williams said.

    The slowdown in sales of Michelob Ultra is of particular concern to Anheuser-Busch because it had been one of the fastest-growing brands on the market, said David Steinman, vice president and executive editor at Beer Marketer’s Insights.

    I love that there is a magazine called “Beer Marketer’s Insights.” It is so profoundly American.

    In the past, I have never liked boycotts, perhaps because they were a tactic of the Left. But when Gillette began insulting men as toxic I stopped buying their products because I was insulted. It wasn’t so much a boycott as a repulsion to their “identity.” To this day I avoid their products as if they were picked up off a San Francisco sidewalk and covered in human feces.

    Advertising has always been about creating goodwill–corporations actually have an accounting for the value of goodwill and it is considered a real asset. The value that the “brand” brings. It’s why you see commercials like this:

    That ad isn’t about beer, but to build goodwill. Budweiser destroyed a good chunk of that goodwill by insulting its customers.

    Early on in the controversy, I saw some people arguing that most Americans don’t care enough to boycott the brand and that the controversy would blow over. History was on the side of the doubters.

    But “most people” is a generic term. “Most people” don’t have to boycott a brand for it to be destroyed. “Enough” people is enough. A 26% drop in sales tells us that about 3/4 of Bud Light drinkers don’t care, but so what? Losing a percent or two of sales is cause for distress at a company. Losing 10% is a cause for panic, and 26% is a disaster of epic proportions.

    Bud Light has lost 26% so far, and the damage continues. Even if sales slowly come back, the goodwill and many customers are gone. It was a devastating blow.

    Good. This was not about Dylan Mulvaney. None of the Dylan Mulvaney controversy is actually about him. It is about the assault on normality, the queering of America. If Dylan decided to get out of the highly lucrative business of cosplaying a young girl the agenda remains, and must be stopped.

    Dylan is a tool, nothing more. A tool that is getting rich off the agenda. It is the agenda that is evil.

    I, for one, was indifferent to Bud Light, not being much of a beer drinker and not a connoisseur of the beverage. I happily drink Miller, and very much like Blue Moon. But I prefer bourbon.

    But now? No, thank you.

    Original Here

  • Someone Stepped In It

    Someone Stepped In It

    That someone is Bud Light vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid. The decision to have a mentally ill man, err transgender activist be the new face of the brand was hers. She said she was inspired to update the “fratty” and “out-of-touch” humor of the beer company with “inclusivity” in an interview on a podcast last month.

    One of the first casualties of that God-forsaken decision was the beer maker’s social media. Since getting one of the biggest ratios I’ve ever seen on Twitter for the announcement tweet, ALL of the Bud Light social media accounts have gone dark. There hasn’t been a single post on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook since the first of April.

    While its market share has been declining of late, Bud Light is still the top selling brand of beer in the US. However, given the anecdotal evidence that’s starting to pop up, the brand is going to lose the top spot, and right soon. And it’s looking like it isn’t just the Bud Light brand that is taking the hit. According to Jeff Fitter, owner of Case & Bucks in Barnhart, Missouri, near the St. Louis headquarters of Anheuser-Busch, sales of Anheuser-Busch bottled products dropped 30% over the past week, while draft beer sales plummeted 50%.

    Fitter isn’t alone in seeing sales declines for Bud Light, Alex Kesaris, the owner of Braintree Brewhouse in Massachusetts said eighty percent of Bud Light drinkers ordered something else this week, while the 20% who did order Bud Light “weren’t on social media and hadn’t heard yet” about its new transgender pitch person. “They didn’t order it again,” he said, after other patrons told them about the Bud Light marketing misfire.

    According to St. Louis-area operator John Rieker the effort to be inclusive excluded the people who matter most — Bud Light drinkers.

    “It’s kind of mind-boggling they stepped into this realm,” Rieker, who owns Harpo’s Bar and Grill in Chesterfield, Missouri, “You’re marketing to an audience that represents a fraction of 1% of consumers while alienating the much larger base of your consumers.”

    I for one, will be keeping an eye out for the quarterly sales reports for A-B. It will be interesting to see how much this hurts A-B and Bud Light.

    Also, you’re welcome for all the old-school Bud Light ads. I miss me some Spuds MacKenzie. . .