The ex-president of U.S. operations at Anheuser-Busch recently claimed that his former company made a huge mistake in making a trans woman one of its Bud Light spokespeople last month.
Anson Frericks, who held the top-level position at the beer company until 2022, claimed that the move to partner with biological-male-turned-trans-woman Dylan Mulvaney goes against Bud Light’s "historic brand identity," and thus, the company lost "track of the consumer."
Now the brand just looks "inauthentic" to its consumer base, Frericks said.
The former Anheuser-Busch executive, who is the co-founder and co-president of Strive Asset Management along with 2024 Republican Party presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, provided the brutal observations to the New York Times in a piece published Tuesday.
His statements were published just after news broke that Bud Light sales were down a whopping 17% in the wake of conservative backlash to the company’s LGBTQ-friendly partnership with Mulvaney.
Before providing Frericks’ take, the Times mentioned Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) professor Americus Reed’s assessment that brands like Bud Light embracing woke marketing tactics is "another way to differentiate yourselves in a competitive marketplace."
Reed provided the example of ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s – which leans heavily left – embracing this strategy. Reed remarked, "Then suddenly that bucket is not just cream and sugar, it’s something else."
The outlet followed Reed with Frericks’ claim that that "logic didn’t necessarily hold for his former company."
"There’s an authenticity element to what Ben & Jerry’s does," Frericks claimed, arguing that it makes more sense for them to promote woke issues. The Times reminded readers how the ice cream company "has built brand identity and loyalty for decades in part by wearing its roots in the hippie enclave of Burlington, Vt., and its liberal politics on its sleeve."
However he explained how Anheuser-Busch doesn’t have a progressive identity, which is why it suffered over the Mulvaney move.
According to the Times, he characterized his former company as "a behemoth of a brand with a customer base that was historically divided more or less evenly between the two sides of the country’s increasingly stark partisan divide."
In addition, he pointed how Bud Light has always had an "identity associated more with Clydesdales, Americana and humorous Super Bowl commercials than social justice."
The former executive stated, "When you have these large corporations that have a historic brand identity, it just looks inauthentic when they’re all of a sudden getting involved in these social campaigns."
He added that his former company has "lost track of the consumer," by making the trans person one of their spokespeople.
PR expert and CEO of Strategic Vision PR Group David Johnson made a similar argument in an interview with Fox News Digital earlier this month, claiming that Bud Light is suffering because the Mulvaney partnership has gone against its "brand identity."
