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As stark as 20% drop within a month is, I don't think you can declare a loss in your prediction yet; we've still got a long ways to go before the 6-month mark. I admit, I predicted similarly to you, and I too am surprised, and I could see the boycott having legs for 6 months and beyond, if regular consumers switch over to Coors Lite or Miller Lite or whatever and make it their habit. 6 months is more than enough time to develop a new habit that one sticks with. I personally don't drink much light beer at all, so I can't say if these products are sufficiently interchangeable that Bud Lite drinkers could stick with the change long-term; the beer snob in me would say obviously they're fungible, but that's obviously not accurate. So maybe the people who are angry/hyped enough to switch over for a month could only handle forcing down Coors Lite for so long before they have to switch back to their favored Bud Lite.
On the boycott itself, though, has any organization come out and called for people to boycott Bud Lite/ABI? I feel like I've seen a lot of people talking about not buying them in reaction to the Mulvaney marketing, but I haven't seen any widespread calls for solidarity coming from big names/organizations. Then again, I'm not much in the target audience for something like that, and I also don't remember much of that during the recent boycott against Hogwarts Legacy, so maybe I shouldn't expect to see something like that.
Are you sure? I think the only sense in which they're not fungible is the branding. As a fellow beer snob, I say that not as a sneer at the quality of any of the products, which are what they are and all do it reasonably well. It's certainly not my favorite style, but American light adjunct lagers aren't unpleasant products and they're all enjoyable with a slice of pizza or on a hot day at the beach - I'm not turning one down if it's what's there and I didn't bring my own. They really are all pretty similar, I think I could distinguish them in a blind taste test, but it doesn't make sense to me that people would really have that strong of a preference between them that they wouldn't be willing to drop one for another if the branding switched from appealing to them to pissing them off.
To take styles that I think are much more varied and that I care about quite a bit more, I would have no trouble electing to boycott an IPA or barrel-aged stout from a brewery that pissed me off. As much as I love Central Waters stouts, I can just buy Founders KBS, 3 Sheeps Wolf, Sierra Nevada Narwhal, or dozens of other options. They're not exactly interchangeable, but they're all good products, and there's no need to buy from someone that tells you to go fuck yourself with their ads.
The main way that I could be wrong is if I'm overestimating the palate of people that prefer light beers and many of them only like one specific narrow taste, like a child that insists on Kraft mac and cheese only.
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I think the more interesting point at which I'd call it a loss isn't really a sales target, though I'd love to see Bud Light go belly up as a brand!, as it is that AB has already backtracked hard and is planning a rumored-nine-figure marketing blitz to get Bud Light back on track. If AB has to spend $100,000,000 to get Bud Light sales back to normal by NFL kickoff, is that a win or a loss? Other companies will look at that and not touch trans stuff.
My prediction wasn't so much that sales would not be impacted X% over Y time frame, it was more that the whole "boycott" would be a nothingburger, some internuts would rant about it but most people wouldn't notice. That this was even reported in the Journal already pushes it past my prediction! If AB spends $100,000,000 on ads featuring white guys in backwards baseball caps crushing brewskis by the lake, that definitely pushes it past my prediction.
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