Bud Light Struggles to Recover from Controversy as Other Brands Gain
The American beer brand Bud Light continues to face challenges following its 2023 controversy, losing its top market position. Parent company Anheuser-Busch is now shifting its marketing focus toward other brands, such as Michelob Ultra.
The American beer brand Bud Light is still struggling to recover from the controversy surrounding its collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, which sparked outrage among the conservative public in the USA and caused it to lose the title of the best-selling beer in the country. The parent company, Anheuser-Busch, has since tried in several ways to court supporters of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, including sponsoring a martial arts tournament in June held on the White House lawn in honor of the president's birthday, but to no avail.
The company is expected to sell 12.7 million barrels of Bud Light in the USA this year, down from 15.8 million barrels in 2024. For comparison, in its peak days in 2007–2008, 41 million barrels were sold, representing 20% of all beer sales in the United States. Therefore, Anheuser-Busch has now moved to a new tactic – focusing on other brands at the expense of Bud Light.
The Financial Times reported that advertising spending on Bud Light, which more than doubled between 2022 and 2023 to $125.2 million, has shrunk every year since. For example, for the first seven months of the year, these expenses stood at $44 million. Moreover, Bud Light was not mentioned at all in a call held by company executives with analysts after the publication of quarterly results last week.
The main beneficiary of the situation is Michelob Ultra, another light beer from Anheuser-Busch, which has replaced Bud Light as the most popular in the USA. Thus, advertising spending on the beer, which also served as a sponsor for the World Cup, has risen since the beginning of the year by 38% to $114 million. Other brands of the company that have increased their market share in the USA are Busch Light and Natural Light.
It is not just Bud Light; the entire US beer market is shrinking. Consumers are reducing consumption for a variety of reasons, including health awareness, the use of weight-loss drugs, or a shift to cannabis. Thus, for the first half of the year, the volumes of beer sold by Anheuser-Busch in North America shrank by 1.9% compared to the previous year.
"Ultimately, beer brands just become too big, in the sense that they cannot be everything to all people. There is always a ceiling, and Bud Light has proven that in a big way," said Robert Ottenstein of the research firm Evercore.
