According to an unnamed former employee of Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light's controversial collaboration with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney may have been a "strategic" effort to change the target market for the brand permanently.
'Strategic Destruction of Bud Light'
After an April Instagram photo by Mulvaney showed a customized Bud Light can, the company received a lot of backlash. The brand's reputation took a major hit after being associated with the transgender TikTok celebrity. Its business, as a result, plummeted.
Although the CEO of Anheuser-Busch said in a statement that the firm had no intention of contributing to an issue that would divide people, the former employee argued that this was deliberate.
During an interview with OutKick's Tomi Lahren, he remarked, "[Employees] expressed the fact that they were shocked. 'Why would they do this? What were they thinking?' Especially now. This is the worst; it's like the worst time yet, the best timing yet if a company were trying to change the way it operates from a corporate level. And that's just my opinion," as reported by New York Post.
He added, "Many of us are talking about that like they planned it in a way ... like a strategic destruction of Bud Light."
The leaker said on Tomi Lahren Is Fearless that no one is pleased with the decline in sales and that everyone thinks the decision is a terrible one. He asserted, however, that this may have been part of a larger corporate campaign to undermine the American firm.
One Reason Why the Fiasco May Have Been Arranged
When InBev acquired the firm from Anheuser-Busch, several decisions that Anheuser-Busch had made were altered, the insider stated.
He went about the company's history of perks before InBev bought it and how those perks have changed. The former worker said that the firm might reorganize employee perks and corporate standards via layoffs and contract renegotiation as a result of the decline in sales for the Bud Light brand.
"Bud Light has been failing for many years. We've talked about that for many years ... Now we have a lot of layoffs, a lot of loss in production. It would be easy for them to restructure, let's say, pay or contracts," he explained.
Apparently, the insider was sure that the upper management would not naively do this and be surprised by the consequences. He added that it was too obvious what was going to happen.
According to reports, Bud Light sales dropped 24.4% for the week ending June 3 compared to the previous year. And Bud Light is no longer the best-selling beer brand in the US for the first time in more than two decades. The title now belongs to Modelo Especial.
