In April of 2023, Bud Light beer ran a social media promotion featuring transgender personality Dylan Mulvaney.  The video promoting Bud Light appeared on Mulvaney’s Instagram account and set in motion a boycott of the brand in the U.S. by conservatives, famously promoted by Kid Rock sharing a video of himself shooting up cases of Bud Light.  In the month that followed, sales of Bud Light dropped well over 20%.  In June of 2023, the MSW TBSM tracking service began to measure brand preference in the Light Beer category.  This week’s Chart of the Week looks at how the brand has done in the past year, as well as the changing face of those who continue to prefer Bud Light.

• In June of 2024, MSW again measured brand preference in the Light Beer category (among nearly 500 adults aged 21 to 74). The results show that not only has brand preference for Bud Light not improved, but it actually exhibited a slight decrease over the past year.
• While Quarter 2 sales for Bud Light are not yet available, data from Bump Williams Consulting as cited by Yahoo News on May 10th of this year show Bud Light sales at best have leveled off after a continued slow decline through the end of 2023 after the initial plunge in sales at the beginning of the boycott. As of that time, sales stood at 28.2% below pre-boycott levels.
• In May of 2023, shortly after the boycott had taken hold, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB) predicted that the Bud Light boycott may not end. MASB’s argument that this was not a traditional boycott (which typically ends quickly), but rather more like a brand divorce, appears at this point to have been an astute prediction.

Our second chart shows how the demographic composition of those preferring Bud Light has changed between the last time we tracked the Light Beer category in 2018 and the current post-boycott tracking waves in 2024. While other influences could be at play over the intervening years, the boycott is surely the major factor influencing the changing face of who prefers Bud Light.

• One of the reasons cited by the brand’s management for promotions like the Mulvaney video was to improve the brand’s position among younger drinkers. Our chart shows that the brand is now skewing more heavily to younger (ages 21 to 34) consumers, but unfortunately this is likely due to the loss of older consumers due to the boycott – especially those aged 35 to 54 (who were previously the brand’s biggest source of preference).
• The brand also is getting a larger share of its brand preference from the Northeast and to a lesser extent in its Midwest stronghold, with far less of its preference being drawn from the western US.
• Bud Light has traditionally over-indexed strongly among consumers with lower income levels. While this is still the case, the brand’s position among these consumers has weakened somewhat versus those with a higher income level.