Chattering class ignorance or marketing brilliance

I had not intended to post on this.  It then occurred to me that we are seeing something systemic across multiple dimensions.  And something that is being cast in culture war terms but which is actually a straight-forward business trade-off decision making process.

The background is that Bud Light beer recently affiliated itself with a trans influencer.  Bud Light is historically a very guy's guy kind of brand.  Solid salt of the earth working class guys.  

The corporate decision to retain a trans influencer for marketing seems the kind of Dilbert cartoon bonehead decision only a big corporation could make.  Which is probably true.

But I was intrigued.  What combination of circumstances could possibly lead to a blunder of this magnitude.  Reports are all over, perhaps exaggerated to some degree, of sales declines of 30-70% in the space of a week.  For a brand product, that is catastrophic.

My first assumption was that this was a decision arising from some combination of different groups within the Corporate brand making decisions without coordinating with one another.

From Who Is Alissa Heinerscheid? Bud Light's VP of Marketing Amid Trans Debate by Giulia Carbonaro at Newsweek, that does not seem to be the case.  Heinerscheid became the brand manager in July of 2022.  This was her decision, consciously made.  

So, perhaps she is just either ineffective at her job or perhaps she is innumerate.  The trans market is a tiny fraction of a percentage, why was Heinerscheid going after such a vestigial market share?  Lack of intelligence and innumeracy can be ruled out.

A Wharton School and Harvard graduate, Heinerscheid's professional history includes jobs at American giants General Mills and Johnson & Johnson, where she was the associate brand manager of Listerine. Between 2018 and 2020, she was the senior director of Bud Light's Communications team.

OK.  What other explanation?  In her own words.

Talking during an interview for Make Yourself at Home, a show hosted by Kristin Twiford and presented by household management app Nines, on March 23, Heinerscheid said: "I am a businesswoman. I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, it was...this brand is in decline. It has been in decline for a very long time. And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light.

"So I had this super clear mandate," she said. "It's like, we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. And my...what I brought to that was a belief in, okay, what does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that's truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different and appeals to women and to men."

That is partially understandable.  You have a strong brand which is not growing and might be shrinking.  Your mission is to grow sales volume and revenue.  You have three choices.  You can grow by increasing sales to the existing base.  You can grow by sales to new market segments.  Or you can grow by both increasing unit sales to the existing base while also bringing in new markets (geography or market segments.)

Her analysis is that they are not attracting young beer drinkers.  Again, possibly true.  So she wants to add youthful beer drinkers.  If she expands the youth segment she will solve the business problem of declining sales.  

But that is where the thought process seems to go off the rails.  We need to change to get more young beer drinkers.  We need to be more inclusive to get more beer drinkers.  

But inclusivity is merely an ideological slogan.  You want more beer drinkers, not more inclusivity.  Unless inclusivity is the means to achieve more beer sales.  For Heinerscheid, inclusivity meant more beer sales from young beer drinkers.  Mistaking increased inclusivity for increased beer sales was apparently Heinerscheid's error.  

But how on earth could she assume that greater inclusivity would automatically translate into greater beer sales?  Maybe she was overfocused on young beer drinkers and lost sight of Bud Light's actual customer base.  She thought affiliating with the trans community would be appealing to young beer drinkers.  A somewhat dubious proposition but at least it has a logic to it.  

But how could she ignore the established base to such a degree.  Someone at some point must have done some sort of trade-off assessment.  If we do X to boost out brand to a new segment of beer drinkers, how will it enhance or detract from our existing base of beer drinkers.  Somehow, inconceivably, they did not do that assessment.  Or did it and ignored it.

I am guessing the latter.

Heinerscheid argued that "representation is sort of the heart of evolution. You've got to see people who reflect you in the work. And we had this hangover—I mean, 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."

So her choice to increase beer sales was to reject her established base of beer drinkers because they were too fratty and had humor which did not appeal to her and sought to pursue new young beer drinkers by appealing to their inclusivity through appearing inclusive of the trans-community.  It is hard not to sense a strong class issue in her thinking.

Now we are getting somewhere. 

Heinerscheid is clearly bright, numerate, credentialed and experienced.  She had a clear goal (increase beer sales).  What seems to have happened is (possibly) a fourfold error.

She assumed that inclusivity would increase sales.

She assumed that affiliating with a trans influencer would strongly signal inclusivity.

She assumed that the inclusivity signal would bring in youthful drinkers (adding beer revenue).

She assumed that the views and opinions and values of the actual established base could be taken for granted and they would not react to her new strategies.

The fourth is obviously the most egregious error and the one seemingly compounded by class disdain.  From a risk perspective she took a novel marketing strategy with weak prospects (trans affiliation would drive brand inclusivity would drive an increase in young drinkers that would be net greater than any effect on the established customer base.)

Still seems an incomprehensible decision.  But my secondary thought was that this actually echoes what we are seeing in our governance.  The chattering credentialed class have developed a set of assumptions and beliefs which are incompatible with those of American citizenry.  American citizen values which are ignored or rejected by the chattering class might be said to include:

Natural rights (speech, assembly, religion, etc.)

Due process

Rule of law and equality before the law

Consent of the governed

Importance of functional education, personal and property safety, strong economy.

Individual autonomy followed by family, then friends, then community, then nation.  

Heinerscheid ignored almost all of these.  She assumed that that the existing customer base had no role to be played in her brand decisions.  She assumed she did not need to take into account a class of people for whom she had little regard (fratty people with unrefined humor).  She assumed she needed no consent from the existing base.

Not only does this sound like the chattering class belief set but it reminds us how much latent class bias undergirds the chattering class decision-making.

Heinerscheid is bright, numerate, credentialed and experienced.  She was trying to solve a real business problem (flat or declining sales volume and revenues.)  

She sought to increase revenues by targeting new drinkers from among the young.  

She believed that the young would be attracted to a brand image of inclusivity.

She attempted to signal inclusivity by recruiting a trans influencer.

She believed that no action taken to recruit young drinkers would affect her existing base.

And she was wrong at virtually every step.

There is only possible interpretation here that I can see that makes sense but is far-fetched.

Perhaps this is a massive marketing psyops?  What if this is a Hail Mary marketing strategy?  It is notoriously challenging to move the dial much on established brands.  It is hard to get your customer base to pay attention.  It is hard to generate energy.  

A horrible and obvious misstep like this gets a lot of attention and engages the existing base.

If there is a genuine mea culpa and a reaffirmation to the existing base with some actions that are taken as genuine by the base, Bud Light could come out ahead.  They will have gotten market chatter and energy and might get a renewed and strengthened commitment with the base.  This would be a high risk strategy but a bold one.  And in some ways, one more likely to succeed than the course of action taken so far.

So possibly this was a bold and edgy strategy.  Or possibly this was a function of a cocooned, isolated, class disdainful member of the chattering class failing to see the gulf between her belief sets and those of the American citizenry who are her target market.

Perhaps with time we will know.