Bud Light has suffered significant losses since April 2023.
A top industry analyst said Thursday that Bud Light likely will not fully recover its losses in 2024 amid a sustained boycott after the brand engaged with a transgender social media influencer.
Bump Williams, president and CEO of Bump Williams Consulting, told CNN that the brand still continues to face consistent year-over-year losses, saying that its distributors “still feel insulted, slighted and minimized by corporate’s lack of apology and insensitive comments about how little Bud Light’s volume has had on their global business and volume trends.”
Earlier this year, Bud Light drew significant backlash after it produced a customized beer can for transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, who posted images of the can on social media. The brand and its parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, immediately attempted to distance itself from the controversy, and Bud Light has since attempted to pivot back to its more traditional, NFL-related advertising.
But Mr. Williams said that he does not think that Bud Light will “fully recover its losses in 2024 and probably would have suffered greater declines” if it wasn’t for an announced Anheuser-Busch financial program that it set up with some Bud Light distributors.
A former Anheuser-Busch U.S. executive, Anson Frericks, told a Fox Business show earlier this week that certain companies, including Bud Light, will have a lengthy “road to recovery.” He noted that major corporations spend years building their brands via advertising and marketing campaigns.
“Finally, people are seeing that when companies get involved in these social and political issues that have nothing to do with their mission and their stock price plummets—that’s bad for these companies, that’s bad for people relying on them just to make them money so they can retire with dignity,” he added.
As Bud Light sales tanked, the Anheuser-Busch U.S. division head, Brendan Whitworth, said in late April his company did not want to be “part of a discussion that divides people,” although he did not directly address the Mulvaney controversy.
