Dylan Mullaney Bud Light Market Losses

3 min readJul 6, 2023

Recently in a marketing controversy, the beer brand Bud Light has used the trans-influencer Dylan Mullaney, who identifies as a male-to-female trans-woman.

This article will discuss the problem Bud Light faces with its marketing strategy.

To avoid controversy, I will not focus on the transgender or the definition of a woman argument in this article.

If you are unsure what a male or a female is and different classifications, you may have a serious problem (Don’t we all).

What will be discussed is Bud Light’s failure to understand its marketing brand and that it is suffering from the classic problem of the brand not identifying with the current corporate aims for that brand.

Bud Light Audience

Historically, the average Bud light drinker is a male aged between 18 and 29 years old; the brand has advertised these men by appealing to prestige, female interest and the male frat party culture in the United States to appeal to its drinker’s culture group.

The marketing team at bud light are responsible for selling alcoholic beverages, and they have made a mistake in its marketing strategy by trying to expand its market reach into the LGBT to you communities within the United States while alienating its current buyer base.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about trying to expand your product band into new markets to sell to different types of customers, and indeed if the goal was to shift away from the straight, male and stale, then the Bud Light campaign by that metric was a success.

More people from the LGBTQ community it by more bud light beers, but the marketers within Bud Light failed to understand the primary goal of a business is to make profits, not to win social justice campaigns.

Know Your Audience and Your Brand

When choosing a marketing strategy, you’ve got to be aware of the goal of your brand and what you want your brand to represent, and this means there will be a clash between what the corporation wants the brand to stand for and what the people buying the brand actually is.

When giving a marketing team instruction, they perform two metrics: sales and the internal office politics within their existing organisation.

For example, a goal can be to generate likes or views of a product; if that product doesn’t generate any revenue, people liking the product is not necessarily leading to more sales.

This is why the Bud Light campaign beer giant’s parent company, Anheuser- Busch suffers a $ 3 billion loss.

The issue is not necessarily with Dylan Mullaney but with the marketing strategy at Bud Light needing to know their customers.

The American supermarket chain made a similar mistake in changing its stores’ interior layout in a move by one of its chief executives to a more upmarket and higher-class experience.

This change cost the company millions and the executive their position because they needed to understand that its customers’ clutter and buying choices were what appealed to its lower economic class store users.

This mistake was because the executive was used to working more upmarket stores in the United States and needed to be more familiar with and aware of the Walmart consumer.

By reading this article, if you take anything away from this piece, it is to understand who the audience is, who buys the product and that the branding matches the consumer.

This simple failure cost Bud Light 15% of its market price value.