Years from now, business schools will teach the case of Bud Light as a cautionary tale. Suggested course titles: How to Destroy Your Brand Without Really Trying, or Five Ways to Lose Customers by Picking ‘Influencers’. The question will be whether Bud Light still exists when universities and colleges try to analyze the disaster that Anheuser-Busch wrought with its market-leading and culturally popular product.

First, they alienated their traditional “fratty” customer base by partnering with transgender “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney in hopes of scoring some free social-media boosts, while their marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid publicly insulted customers by painting them as unsophisticated rubes. That got their customers inspired to drink anything but Bud Light and fueled conservative attacks on the whole A-B and InBev catalog of beverages.

Now, because Anheuser-Busch has abandoned its attempt to woo the transgender crowd, activists and leaders on the Left are demanding their own Bud Boycott:

Jay Brown, a senior vice president at the Human Rights Campaign, wrote a letter to Anheuser-Busch last week asking the firm to release a statement explicitly supporting Mulvaney and to implement transgender inclusion training for executives. “In this moment, it is absolutely critical for Anheuser-Busch to stand in solidarity with Dylan and the trans community,” the document said, according to a report from The Hill. “However, when faced with anti-LGBTQ+ and transphobic criticism, Anheuser-Busch’s actions demonstrate a profound lack of fortitude in upholding its values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Stacy Lentz, a co-owner of the Stonewall Inn, widely considered the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ political movement, said in an interview with Newsweek that Anheuser-Busch had “missed an opportunity to stand by their commitment to the trans community by pandering to and giving into transphobic outcries.” She predicted that “as a brand they will be extinct in a few years if they are not fully on the side of equality,” citing the left-wing values broadly held by young Americans.

The Daily Wire also links to a column by a PR exec at The Advocate, the most high-profile LGBTQ publication, that explicitly called for a movement-wide boycott of the brand:

Rather than come to the defense of a transgender woman, rather than defend a noble campaign that sought to reflect acceptance, and rather than let the campaign with Mulvaney speak for itself, Anheuser-Busch poured alcohol all over an extremist’s fire, and that will continue to singe our community.

Maybe the worst thing the company did was leave Mulvaney all alone, twisting in the wind, abandoning any kind of defense of her. That is an utterly repugnant reflection of the brand.

Anheuser-Busch, weakly, did not stand up against hate. And while boycotts don’t work, they do make a statement. It’s not Kid Rock and Ted Nugent who should be boycotting Bud Light — it should be us.

To be fair, John Casey’s column appeared on April 17, before the extent of the demand destruction at A-B was known. But still, the cynic in me wonders whether all the demand now for a counter-boycott isn’t more of an attempt to wrest credit for the death of Bud Light from conservatives and claim it as a victory for the LGBTQ movement. That doesn’t mean that their complaints about moral cowardice at A-B aren’t legit, because Bud Light execs certainly did abandon their partnership with ‘influencer’ Mulvaney at the first sign of trouble. This still looks more like a PR exec’s efforts to get ahead of a massive defeat by spinning it into victory.

If so, it won’t work, because the problem here isn’t so much Mulvaney as it is Alissa Heinerscheid and the execs at Bud and A-B. If not for her derogatory comments about Bud Light’s consumer base, the one-off can for Mulvaney may have passed with only a mild and short-lived impact. Other brands have gone farther in choosing trans endorsers; David wrote yesterday about Smirnoff and its massive parent Diageo, for instance, and Nike actually paid Mulvaney to endorse its line of sports bras with a ridiculous video that all but mocked the athleticism and skills of legitimate female athletes. Why didn’t those brands take the same kind of damage, at least thus far?

Because their execs didn’t go out of their way to insult the people who buy their product. This one-minute clip will likely get at least five lectures in the Death of Bud Light Harvard Business case study. In sixty-four seconds, Heinerscheid demolishes her career at A-B as well as any impression that the beermaker knows or cares anything about the people who buy its industrial-level lagers:

This is what happens when corporations take sides in social debates — especially when their executives either don’t know their customer base, don’t like their customer base — or in Heinerscheid’s case, both. The ignorance in this is breathtaking, and on a core level. People buy and drink beer for fun, at least aspirationally (it can’t be for the taste). They’re not buying it to get lectures on “representation,” they’re not buying it for the “equity,” and they’re certainly not drinking it to toast Mulvaney’s “womanhood.”

That’s why all of the marketing campaigns that preceded Heinerscheid worked. That “fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor” appealed to consumers’ desire for fun, and the opportunity for social connections that fun presents. Those ad campaigns got designed by people who not just understood the consumer base for industrial-scale beer but actually kinda liked the people buying it. Or at least liked their money enough to refrain from pushing lectures on “representation” as a rebuke to their “out of touch humor” and their desire for fun over political battles.

Anheuser-Busch could have hired a hundred men and women off the street who would have figured that out in a heartbeat. Instead, they chose a Harvard English Lit major and a Wharton School post-grad who “took over Bud Light” and tried to remake in her social-conscience image — and ended up alienating everyone, including her putative allies. Now no one wants to drink their beer, because Anheuser-Busch’s woke push destroyed the fun for everyone.

Now all that’s left is a fight over who gets to claim credit for the corpse of Bud Light. I’m no Wharton School graduate, but that seems, y’know … bad for the future of Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch. Eventually all sides might forget about their anger, but Bud Light marched itself into a political and public-relations box canyon for no good reason at all and lost billions of dollars in making enemies across the spectrum. And it will be a very long time before consumers on any scale associate Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch products with “fun.”

Ironically, Bud Light ran a Super Bowl ad six years ago in which the brand tried to resurrect its most famous icon of fun, Spuds MacKenzie. His ghost certainly haunts the brand now, doesn’t it?

And just to remind everyone of the wildly successful ad campaign, here’s one of the original Spuds MacKenzie ads. Fun fact: I went to high school with one of the Spuds women (although we didn’t know each other — large school and I was a couple of years ahead), who turned out to be a fine actor and did a number of top-drawer films. See if you can guess who that was in the comments below. Because this should be — wait for it — fun, right?