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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Budweiser have made an error here it seems, but there are plenty of past cases of entering into the culture war delivering higher sales, and given that the business of business is business there is no reason why they shouldn't try to exploit those cases.

While that is true, there are ways to switch to the progressive support angle. Every company pretty much swathes itself in rainbows for Pride Month, to the extent that LGBT activists are cynical about woke capitalism.

Dumping your core demographic before you have the new client base in place was a bad idea. I saw one Twitter or Instagram or wherever video where a woman was going on about "do the rednecks not know that thousands of dollars of marketing research went into this, do they really think their little tantrum is going to achieve anything, don't they understand that a huge business like this wouldn't do anything without a plan in place?"

Well, looks like none of that was true. I think it was a test run by the marketing VP to try and get limited exposure using a popular influencer to start switching to the younger, liberal audience, and seeing by the results how this would go (would they all indeed go over to the March Madness Bud website and enter?) but it went badly wrong.

And all the "we never partnered with Mulvaney" isn't much cop, seeing as how Mulvaney's Instagram still has the video up with the hashtag #budlightpartner, oh dear:

Happy March Madness!! Just found out this had to do with sports and not just saying it’s a crazy month! In celebration of this sports thing @budlight is giving you the chance to win $15,000! Share a video with #EasyCarryContest for a chance to win!! Good luck! #budlightpartner

I think the big mistake was the promotional can with Mulvaney's face on it; sure, it might only be one can (or several, how many they sent out was unclear) that were never going to hit the shelves in stores, but there have been so many promotional cans that did hit the shelves, it's easy to see why people assumed this was the same thing.