Maybe stop calling attention to the problem?
Bud Light offers $15 beer rebates for Fourth of July weekend amid boycott, declining sales
As the Fourth of July weekend rolls in, Bud Light is offering a rebate of up to $15 on purchases of a 15-pack of Budweiser, Bud Light, Budweiser Select or Budweiser Select 55. And in places where a 15-packs sells for less than $15, the beer could be practically free.
Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, offered the same promotion over Memorial Day weekend.
The rebate applies to purchases of up to $15 that are made between June 15 and July 8 and will be offered via a prepaid digital card. Customers can redeem rebates on the Bud Light website. Rules vary by state.
It won’t help.
The company introduced a new television commercial “Easy to Summer,” set to the soundtrack of “Good Times,” the 1979 hit by Chic. Social and digital content will feature famous NFL players like Travis Kelce, George Kittle and Dak Prescott, and Tyler Braden and Seaforth will headline a national summer music tour, the Bud Light Backyard tour.
Really, this means that AB will be losing money on every can that it sells during this promotion. The retailers bought it at wholesale prices. The retailers make their profit. Bud Light is giving a rebate of more than the wholesale price that it got. This is a way for Bud Light to try to get rid of all of the excess inventory of its retailers and itself. Desperation move. The shareholders should be very happy about that. And adding these stars won’t help. And it could hurt them, especially Braden.
(Fox News) Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth declined to say if he would allow Bud Light’s disastrous promotion with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to happen again, in hindsight, despite ongoing backlash.
“It’s been a challenging few weeks. I think the conversation surrounding Bud Light has moved away from beer, and the conversation has become divisive. And Bud Light really doesn’t belong there. Bud Light should be all about bringing people together. And there’s an impact on the business, and I think that’s publicly covered on Bud Light specifically,” Whitworth said Wednesday on “CBS Mornings.”
This is one of those “between a rock and a hard place” interviews, where he can end up annoying the core consumers and then extreme rainbow alphabet folks (do they buy AB products?). The best thing to have done was lay low and hope it blows over, because all this just keeps it going.