Volume 138: Bud Light Unites The Nation.

1. Bud Light Unites The Nation.

tl;dr: AB InBev creates the Cocaine Bear of business case studies.

K. In case you’re not in the US or have been living under a rock for the past month, here’s what happened in a nutshell:

Bud Light, the nation’s most popular beer brand, sent an Instagram influencer a celebratory can of beer with her face printed on it as a gift. Yay! The influencer showed this off to her ten million followers. Win! The influencer is trans. Oooh! In a desperate attempt at relevance, Kid Rock shot cases of Bud Light with a rifle and posted it. Bah! Right-wing media and talking heads became performatively outraged. Aaaah! Bud Light sales declined as a segment of beer buyers switched to other brands. Aaargh! Anheuser Busch management freaked out. The Sky Is Falling! Eeek! And put the marketers in charge on gardening leave. Wut? Guaranteed To Fix Everything. Not!!! And the CEO released the most bizarre statement in history as a response. Now We’re Making Everything Much, Much, Worse. Wheee!!!!

I’m guessing this response was a panicked and ultimately vain attempt to appease the can-shooting brigade while somehow trying not to piss off the non-can-shooters, which would’ve been some seriously impossible pretzel ju-jitsu if they’d pulled it off. But, of course, they didn’t.

So, where are we now? A bunch of right-leaning people got pissed at Bud Light and boycotted it, and now a bunch of left-leaning people are pissed at Anheuser Busch’s utterly inept response to the right being pissed, so they’re boycotting it too. And as a result of pissing everyone off, sales are slipping ever further, and it’s bleeding through to other AB InBev brands, which is extending the news cycle, and…

…I have to tip my cap to Anheuser Busch and its incompetent cowardice in the face of fire. I literally thought it was impossible to unite the opposing political factions of this country, but they’ve absolutely managed it. Meanwhile, MillerCoors is laughing all the way to the bank.

What’s the moral of this tale? Well, some would say that we live in such polarized times that brands must manage their every move with great care. Because no matter how tiny the probability of such a small act blowing up into a culture-war fracas, the possibility is always there. So you’d better not upset anyone…

…but, I call bullshit on that. The Internet is brimming with people looking for any excuse for a performative boycott on all sides of the political spectrum. It rarely lasts for more than a moment because we’re like societal goldfish with 7-second attention spans. This means the worst thing you can do is reflexively react the way AB did and extend the news cycle unnecessarily.

Nike didn’t react when people were cutting its logos out of their socks (funny story, I once stood in line behind a lobster-red man at a lobster shack in Maine, and it took me ages to figure out why his socks had big holes in them), Keurig didn’t react when people were smashing its machines with hammers, and I don’t see Home Depot or Yeungling much caring either. The only one that’s had to care is Disney, and they’re suing. The strategy that seems to work best, generally, seems to be one of sticking to your guns and letting the crazy pass.

Reflexively reacting leads to nothing but pain, both short and long-term. Short-term, it keeps you in the news cycle exactly when you don’t want to be anywhere near it. Long term, marketers more broadly become ever more small-c conservative, ever more worried about offending someone, anyone, and ever concerned that the entirety of their actions should be little more than unnoticeable milquetoast because they’d much rather have a job than not.

There’s no doubt that we live in politically volatile times. Things we might consider entirely innocent, like sending someone a can of beer with her face on it, can be politically weaponized at any moment to fuel the continued profitability of the outrage economy. So, it’s not what we do that matters so much as how we respond.

This is why, even though they seem entirely unrelated, the collapse of SVB and this mini-crisis at AB have much in common. How you communicate in response to a crisis matters much in our current environment. And, so far, corporations are consistently being found wanting. The common thread doesn’t appear to be that they can’t communicate; it’s that the default position is one of cowardice. The answer cannot be cowardice; it must be leadership.

Ultimately, the lesson here shouldn’t be about being careful to whom you send a can of beer. (Although, sadly, I suspect this is exactly how many brands will react) It’s actually about how you respond to such unanticipated crises with leadership and maturity when they inevitably happen to your brand.

So, congratulations AB InBev on creating the Cocaine Bear of business case studies. It literally couldn’t have acted any dumber.

2. “Only A Small, Biased Part of Our Lives Are Online.”

tl;dr: Is it wrong that I’m looking forward to a book on metrics?

Prof. Jenni Romaniuk, in case you haven’t heard of her, is a part of that merry band of Australian marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. For some reason, I always picture it being a bit like Hogwarts for marketers (except with a good fishing lake) and professors that look like Dumbledore and McGonnigal. I really should get out more.

She often writes about brands and marketing, much of which is probably worth your time to at least skim, if not read, cover to cover.

Anyway, in advance of her latest book on metrics, she’s been on the talking head circuit, which is how I picked up my headline quote. It was meant in the context of whether we can measure everything we need about a brand’s health from online observation and commentary, but it seemed so apropos to life in general, especially in light of the above story, that I couldn’t resist using it here.

On the subject of metrics, I’m inordinately delighted to see Prof. Romaniuk tackling this topic in a book, even if I feel deeply uncool admitting it, and I’ll probably make sure and walk out of the store with it firmly wrapped in a brown paper bag when I buy it.

It’s a subject I get asked about fairly often, and I have to admit that my knowledge always feels lacking. Not that I don’t know what goes into a typical brand health tracker, brand equity study, or similar set of longitudinal analyses, but just that I always doubt that they’re particularly useful, insightful, or actionable.

From the Q&A in the article linked above, her point about smaller and larger brands needing to control for relative scale when interpreting brand health metrics rings particularly true for me. With really large brands in particular, I can’t tell you how often I’ve had that discombobulating moment where the brand health tracker seems to say everything is just fine and dandy, but there’s clearly something not right in the business. I deeply suspect that brand health analyses where scale isn’t controlled for tend to directly correlate with big brands behaving as conservatively as they often do. The why is that they aren’t seeing anything in their brand health data telling them there’s a burning platform forcing them to be bolder, so they focus more on not rocking the boat than on pushing the brand harder.

Her observation also amused me that so much of what we see demographically has less to do with old people and young people being fundamentally different and more to do with the fact that if you target one demographic group (e.g., “the youth”) and not another (e.g., “the money”), you shouldn’t expect your brand to resonate among those you haven’t targeted. Mainly because they aren’t seeing you rather than your being intrinsically not for them. So, take that, all you generation-ists. (OK, I admit it; I’m biased. I view generational segmentation as one of the longest cons in marketing, and there are a lot of cons in marketing, folks. There’s almost zero empirical evidence to support its veracity, and it’s stretching the bounds of credulity to believe you can predict someone’s life behavior before they’ve even been born. So I’ll leave it at that.)

Anyhoo. I’m buying the book, brown paper bag, and all, and I will report more on it when I get hold of a copy next month. But, in all honestly, it’ll probably be more of a review of the dust jacket, as it’s a rare business book where I get beyond the first chapter. And metrics…zzzzzz.

If you’re equally as perverse as I am and take an unhealthy interest in brand health metrics, I suggest you get a copy too. Equally, if you don’t have an unhealthy interest but need better metrics to shock your organization into action…well, you know what to do, Amazon, credit card, etc.

PS. I get nothing if you buy this book. Prof. Romaniuk doesn’t even know I exist.