Checking In on Bud Light

I haven’t thought about Bud Light in ages, except when I give it a pass at the liquor store. 

I’m not much of a beer drinker, and when I decide I need a cold brewski, I tend to go lowbrow and the opposite of whatever an IPA is. I will splurge on a Blue Moon, but a Miller suits me fine. I even enjoy Trader Joe’s cheap lager. 

But of course, I joined the pile-on when Bud Light made fun of its core consumer base by embracing alphabet ideology and the “Days of Girlhood” shtick of Dylan Mulvaney. Not because I had an attachment to Bud or Bud Light, but because corporations embracing alphabet ideology was peak woke. 

Doing alphabet propaganda needed to be punished, and Bud Light was severely so. 

I thought of the brand once again because I saw an ad for Bud Light in my X feed, so I decided to see how the brand was doing. The boycott of Bud Light was a turning point in the culture war–notice how Pride Month went by with a relative minimum of rainbows and naked unicorns this year?–and it piqued my interest. Just how is the once-famed beer brand doing?

Special thanks to Dylan Mulvaney for ending Pride Month.

After we demolished Bud Light (their sales never recovered by the way) every company is now terrified to push the woke agenda.

Almost no companies put a rainbow in their pictures!

Thanks for the help Dylan! pic.twitter.com/WCfx2P2CyN

— The Gay Republican 🇺🇲✝️🇮🇱 (@GayRepublicSwag) June 2, 2025

Not well, it turns out. Not well at all. 

Before the company decided to create a bonfire with all its goodwill capital by attacking its fan base as “frat boys” and embracing our new woke overlords, Bud Light was the #1 selling brand in America. 

#1. Guess what it is now? The #3 or #4 brand in America. (I have found both quoted, but sales figures are sketchy the closer to now you get). 

That is quite a fall. 

Bud Light hasn’t recovered from Mulvaney controversy, ex-Anheuser-Busch exec says https://t.co/eKm0djsUtO pic.twitter.com/WJ2SkBGrVE

— New York Post (@nypost) February 8, 2025

The brand has, it seems permanently, lost about 30% of its customers, and since the only real value of the beer was its brand loyalty, it’s hard to see how they recover. There is nothing especially good or bad about the beer. Snobs hated it already; people bought it because it was cheap, adequate, and had alcohol. Other beers fit that mold, like Miller Lite. 

People bought it because, well, they always had and the commercials were kinda cool. Brand recognition was the only thing it had that others didn’t quite as much, and that was enough. 

Bud Light sales were down 29.9% year-over-year for the week ending Jan. 20, compared with the same period last year, according to the latest numbers provided to FOX Business by Bump Williams Consulting, which analyzed NielsenIQ data. 

“I think that’s one of the most interesting parts about this story is that they lost 30% of their customers,” he pointed out. “Millions of customers, billions of dollars of shareholder value over the last couple of years.”

The former executive noted how the partnership impacted stocks and how the brand’s efforts to recover with Super Bowl ads would not relieve the pain.  

“They are advertising Bud Light. And candidly, the commercials are actually pretty good,” he said. “They have Shane Gillis, who’s about the opposite of Dylan Mulvaney. You couldn’t have maybe someone more opposite. They have Post Malone, but the problem is they’ve lost a lot of their customers.” 

Most brands got the message, but obviously not all. Beege wrote a great piece about how Jaguar self-immolated by following the Bud Light path of brand destruction. Only they chose to do it by pouring gasoline on themselves and lighting themselves on fire in front of a Pride parade or something. 

Jaguar’s sales collapsed by 98%. Turns out, this wasn’t the greatest rebrand:

pic.twitter.com/BRGQkhR7cO

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 30, 2025

I mean, c’mon. You have to at least applaud how spectacularly they failed. They looked at Bud Light and shouted, “Hold my beer!”

Jaguar: Bud Light hold my beer… https://t.co/4FDT2Of1OP

— Kevin Corke (@kevincorke) July 1, 2025

What these two have in common is the absolute contempt the corporations showed for their core customers. They looked at who they were serving and decided they weren’t the right sort of people. 

So they thought, “I will upgrade my customers!” Queers are in, so why stick to the old formula that has worked so well?

How’d that work out? It turns out that the Queer market is pretty small, and the frat boys and James Bond wanna-bes are a better market for companies that have been catering to them for decades. 

No doubt there is a market for “Queer” stuff, but it is a niche within a niche, and likely one that will crash and burn soon enough. Trendy means tied to a trend, and trends are transitory. 

The permanent damage to the Bud Light brand has turned out to be a good thing. Conservatives are not generally into boycotts, but Bud Light was easy enough. Nobody who drinks Bud Light does so because it is especially great, so the switch is easy, and the results were spectacular. 

Were AB-Inbev a family business, I might feel a twinge of guilt. But then again, a family business can afford to be selling niche products. AS it is the Bud Light fall has taught these big transnational corporations that they are not in charge of us, but the other way around. 

At least we can be, if we so choose.