One year after Bud Light teamed up with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a partnership that led to a highly effective boycott of the brand, the Anheuser-Busch company is in danger of losing 18 percent of grocery store shelf space.
Bud Light Hit With Crushing Blow
The New York Post reported that Bud Light is set to be pushed out as store managers rearrange the alcoholic beverages section to give more precious real estate to beers that are selling better.
“Anheuser-Busch’s beers will lose a range of about 10% to 15% of their space nationally as resets start,” Jesse Ferber, chief strategy officer for Columbia Distributing, which works with retailers such as Walmart and Target in the Pacific Northwest, told Bloomberg News.
Ferber went on to say that while the final numbers won’t be known for another month or two, he believes that stores all over the United States may downgrade Bud Light’s shelf space by as much as 18%, though he added that in other areas it could be as low as 5%.
In contrast, Molson Coors Brewing Co, whose stable of brands includes Coors Light, Miller Lite and Coors Banquet, is likely to receive a boost in shelf space of more than 10%. That company’s president Brian Feiro boasted that over 50 retailers increased shelf space for Coors Light and Miller Lite by 6% to 7% last summer and fall.
A spokesperson for Anheuser-Busch tried to downplay concerns for Bud Light, admitting that the company is expecting “small shifts across brands” when it comes to shelf space. This spokesperson added that Bud Light and Michelob Ultra, another Anheuser-Busch beer, are “the top two share-of-space brands in the beer industry.”
This came one year after conservatives launched a boycott of Bud Light over the Mulvaney partnership that included the company giving the transgender influencer a special can in celebration of “365 Days of Girlhood.” Anheuser-Busch losr an estimated $1 billion in sales over the boycott, and the company’s most recent earnings report showed that its U.S. revenue declined 17.3% in the fourth quarter and 9.5% for the full year.
Anson Frericks, a former president of operations for Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch, told Fox Business back in February that the brand is having difficulty winning back consumers because Anheuser-Busch has not asked the customers “to come back to them.”
“They haven’t done a good job of climbing out of this ditch at all,” Frericks said. “You still have sales that are down 30% week over week, and that’s despite them last summer spending three times their planned marketing budget on Bud Light.”
Watch him talk more about this in the video below.
Even Mulvaney has turned on Bud Light and has taken to speaking out against the brand.
“I think of it [Bud Light] kind of like a parent, where the parent doesn’t put a stop to something, then the bullying can continue,” Mulvaney said last month, according to Daily Mail. “These brands need to step up.”
Bud Light has learned the hard way that teaming up with someone like Mulvaney to appease the left is never a good idea. In the end, other brands should take notice, or else they might find themselves in the same sinking boat as Bud Light!
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