Interesting article. I never understood the Bud Light thing. They opted to be more inclusive but that didn’t exclude the core customer. It seemed to me that the core customer decided to feel excluded for reasons larger the Bud Light’s marketing campaign.
If I put you in a time machine and sent it to the Bud Light influencer marketing meeting where they approved sending beer to Dylan Mulvaney and you stood up and said “I’m come from the future and Kid Rock is going to see this, get mad about it, shoot a case of Bud Light on Instagram. This will trigger a nationwide boycott that will plummet sales by 40% for years and erase billions in company value.” I think the executives would look at you say, “you lost me at the kid rock part.”
It defied all logic, really.
Cracker Barrel went much farther with that new logo and plans to “modernize” stores that fundamentally changed how core customers saw and experienced the brand. It was much more obviously alienating to their core customer.
It’s really more analogous to the New Coke debacle.
The issue with Bud Light is somewhat similar. Declining brand, so they opted to target a different demo with a legacy brand which rarely works. They should have created a different product for a new audience to make up for the lost revenue. They could have avoided a lot of trouble if their VP of Marketing hadn’t said in an interview: Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach. They basically confirmed that they didn’t want their out of touch fratty customers who heard them loud and clear and defected to other brands. Not smart when you have prime placement in virtually every football stadium and hockey rink in North America.
Really great article. I love deep dives into the behind the scenes of companies and seeing the problems they create for themselves, even if it was to address a real issue that existed. I saw a similar example up close when I worked for a company called Fry’s Electronics for 15 years. The fall from grace was stunning. When i started as a teenager at a location in Oregon in 2004 the store did 1.8 million a week in sales. After moving around the country and two stints in the corporate office ironically i finished with the company running that same location i started in and by 2019 it was doing $50k a week. Similar to most big box retailers online sales caused havoc and created overwhelming competition, but ultimately endless bad choices internally destroyed the company and it closed in 2021. It reminds me that the modern era we are in really isnt that different in that businesses can continue to thrive and theres plenty of demand for products and services, maybe the difference is the margins for error are much slimmer and you cant make bad choices but still thrive.
When I was working my way through graduate school, I worked for a bank and learned early on from the older commercial lenders that many companies survive and make a lot of money despite themselves. It was a good lesson. Bad decisions can go on for a long time before gravity takes hold, as with Fry’s and now with Cracker Barrel.
Interesting article. I never understood the Bud Light thing. They opted to be more inclusive but that didn’t exclude the core customer. It seemed to me that the core customer decided to feel excluded for reasons larger the Bud Light’s marketing campaign.
If I put you in a time machine and sent it to the Bud Light influencer marketing meeting where they approved sending beer to Dylan Mulvaney and you stood up and said “I’m come from the future and Kid Rock is going to see this, get mad about it, shoot a case of Bud Light on Instagram. This will trigger a nationwide boycott that will plummet sales by 40% for years and erase billions in company value.” I think the executives would look at you say, “you lost me at the kid rock part.”
It defied all logic, really.
Cracker Barrel went much farther with that new logo and plans to “modernize” stores that fundamentally changed how core customers saw and experienced the brand. It was much more obviously alienating to their core customer.
It’s really more analogous to the New Coke debacle.
The issue with Bud Light is somewhat similar. Declining brand, so they opted to target a different demo with a legacy brand which rarely works. They should have created a different product for a new audience to make up for the lost revenue. They could have avoided a lot of trouble if their VP of Marketing hadn’t said in an interview: Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach. They basically confirmed that they didn’t want their out of touch fratty customers who heard them loud and clear and defected to other brands. Not smart when you have prime placement in virtually every football stadium and hockey rink in North America.
Yeesh. This explains SO much.
Yes, a slow-motion downfall to be followed by the piecemeal destruction.
Really great article. I love deep dives into the behind the scenes of companies and seeing the problems they create for themselves, even if it was to address a real issue that existed. I saw a similar example up close when I worked for a company called Fry’s Electronics for 15 years. The fall from grace was stunning. When i started as a teenager at a location in Oregon in 2004 the store did 1.8 million a week in sales. After moving around the country and two stints in the corporate office ironically i finished with the company running that same location i started in and by 2019 it was doing $50k a week. Similar to most big box retailers online sales caused havoc and created overwhelming competition, but ultimately endless bad choices internally destroyed the company and it closed in 2021. It reminds me that the modern era we are in really isnt that different in that businesses can continue to thrive and theres plenty of demand for products and services, maybe the difference is the margins for error are much slimmer and you cant make bad choices but still thrive.
When I was working my way through graduate school, I worked for a bank and learned early on from the older commercial lenders that many companies survive and make a lot of money despite themselves. It was a good lesson. Bad decisions can go on for a long time before gravity takes hold, as with Fry’s and now with Cracker Barrel.