Bud Light’s commitment to “diversity” and not job competency will cause its parent company Anheuser-Busch to have a long summer, a former high-level executive said this week.
The company is almost two months into a boycott that will last who knows how long after Bud Light made itself synonymous with the transgender movement.
In early April, it was revealed that the company had printed the face of trans social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a can of its beer as part of a paid partnership.
The move ruined the brand’s reputation with longtime customers overnight, and sales are down by almost a quarter. Additionally, Anheuser-Busch’s market cap had lost more than $15 billion as of Thursday.
All of it could have been avoided, former Anheuser-Busch president of sales and distribution Anson Frericks told The Daily Wire.
Frericks, who spent 10 years at the company, predicted it has a tough road ahead.
“When I first joined, it was the world’s largest private equity firm that happened to sell beer. It was a very merit-based culture,” Frericks said.
He added, “If you take a look at the 10 principles when I first joined, they said, ‘This is a meritocracy, we recruit people better than ourselves.’ If you take a look at their 10 principles now, they say, ‘We’re judged by the diversity of our teams.’”
Anheuser-Busch’s current 10 principles have nothing to say about hard work or being the best.
Do you think Bud Light will recover?
Yes: 5% (2 Votes)
No: 95% (41 Votes)
No. 3 says, “We are powered by great people and build diverse teams through inclusion and collaboration.” The other nine are mindless corporate dribble about topics such as personal growth, innovation and “dreaming big.”
The company’s current list of principles makes it abundantly clear how Bud Light became a byword in such a short time: Anheuser-Busch forgot what put it on top of the beer world and kept it there.
In any event, Frericks had a bleak outlook for his former employer. He predicted “a long, hot, dry summer for Anheuser-Busch.”
“I think that you’re going to see sales continue to be down because … it’s too easy for [customers] to switch to other brands,” he said.
“If they want those customers back, they have an easy decision that they can make, which is saying, ‘We want Bud Light customers back, therefore Bud Light is not going to get involved with political issues moving forward.’ If not, they’re probably going to be in a worse position next year and their sales will continue to decline.”
It appears as though Anheuser-Busch lost its identity by hiring woke executives with questionable values who focused too much on employees’ skin color.
The Mulvaney partnership was a train wreck waiting to happen.
Anheuser-Busch was so worried about its woke credit score that it forgot who its target customers were and proceeded to insult them.
