Get woke, rainbow marketingdon’t go broke: Don’t hesitate about your rainbow marketing
Last year, there was a huge uproar when Budweiser (AB InBev) came under fire from Christian conservatives in the US. Reason? One of the influencers they hired was a transgender person.
A year has passed, but the Bud bang is still ringing. Companies are shocked and hesitant to implement their rainbow marketing. For example, this year there was much less attention for Pride Month (June) than usual. But is this hesitation justified?
The 4 Billion Woman
The reactions to the video were not bad. The video was picked up by right-wingers and it quickly escalated into a ‘message of the day’ that lasted for weeks. Attention everywhere, but a lot of smear campaigning and announcements of a boycott. In practice, the latter often has a positive effect, but in this case it went wrong. Sales dropped, ABInBev lost 4 billion in stock market value, the brand took a dent and Bud itself responded so lukewarmly and cowardly that even the left wing of society, eh, ignored them.
In my article “ The 4 Billion Woman ” I described what happened. In short: Bud regularly sends personalized cans of beer to influencers, which the influencers then show on their socials. Trans woman Dylan Mulvaney was one of them. She has 10 million followers on TikTok and 2 million on Instagram: the posts about her transition were viewed more than 1 billion times. So: a nice reach in a niche market.
In her video, Mulvaney used the beer to celebrate both March Madness and her first year as a woman. And that was the start of a scandal.
Bud Light commercial featuring Transwoman Dylan Mulvaney
Bruce Glikas/WireImage
Get woke, get broke?
It is a now almost worn-out slogan with which the conservatives in society want to object to modernities such as freedom, equality and brotherhood. And of course to everything that has to do with the rainbow. I panama email list 440115 contact leads wrote about Get Woke Go Broke earlier for Frankwatching, with the conclusion that social awareness among marketers and brands is growing stronger. The social media trolls may sputter – usually in vain – but it still hurts. And in the case of Bud much more than that.
The Mulvaney video caught the attention of rapper
Kid Rock (who proceeded to shoot cans of Bud with a machine gun), Republican career hater Marjorie Taylor Greene (who vowed to drink only Coors beer, a brand that has been an ally of LGBTQ+ since 1978), a dumbass in Kansas (who made a mess of a supermarket with trays of “Busch Light” – oops, wrong brand), and finally Fox News (and you know what I mean). The how to create impactful design in canva in 5 steps spiral was culminated in a response from the White House.
Of course, this could not remain without consequences. Where AB InBev dealt with the incident very dully by stammering, half-hearted apologies and sending a few managers on ‘leave’, the stock market reacted with a alb directory panic reaction. Some four billion in value went up in smoke. That is quite a lot for an ‘external’ video of 48 seconds.
Warning
The drama was widely seen as a warning that a brand should be careful with sensitive topics. And sensitive, Marketing the Rainbow still is. I was recently on the Pride Panel of Publicis’ Adsterdam Festival , and there too the Bud story was cited as “how not to do it”. Where last year the brands were still climbing over each other to promote their rainbow products and support, this year it was a lot quieter.
But Adage reported in May, under the headline “Why Pride Month Marketing Is Quieter This Year and How Brands Can Avoid Backlash,” that there was more at play: “In an election year and amid rising culture