Politics, worldview, and lifestyle aside, do the numbers add up to a successful brand campaign?
Have you been inundated with headlines and opinions contextualizing what some have reported being Bud Light’s® marketing misfire? I know I have. With your permission, here’s another.
Numbers don’t discriminate. Without being too detailed—sources vary on specifics, but all agree on the same short-term statistical trends—Bud Light sales are down 30%–50%, and BUD stock has lost around $5 billion in value (at this time of writing).
Pick a brand experience outcome from Bud’s® recent partnership campaign: confused, clouded, captivated, celebrated! All can be acceptable. But a successful outcome depends on who walks away feeling what, from customers to shareholders. If the intended folks feel the planned-for experience—you nailed it!
What’s your opinion?
Was the campaign a success, a failure, or somewhere in between? The company’s response strongly suggests that Anheuser-Busch is disappointed in the financial loss, explicitly caused by the mass exodus of pre-campaign brand loyalists.
Did Bud Light Communicreate™? Communicreation™ asserts that:
- a brand identified is good, but a brand identified WITH is great,
- value sets you apart, but VALUES bring us together, and
- culture is fickle, but COMMUNITY is enduring.
Creating a brand-centric community is at the core of the Communicreation philosophy. Bud Light has an already-established loyal following and wants to expand it. Sure, it makes sense. Unfortunately, they’ve lost some of that critical base in the process. The question is, can or will they even care to recapture them? Either way, there could be a lot of work to do.
For every $1 you invest in keeping a current customer, expect to spend $20 replacing them.
Perhaps a better approach would be creating a new brand for their market diversity initiative. I think that’s a simple solution that would have kept the Bud Light brand intact and a proven way to bring an older predictable company into an unpenetrated new market. That’s my 2¢.
No crystal ball here. Who knows, this could be the most brilliant and successful marketing drama ever, and we’ve yet to see the final act. If so, we’ll talk about that too.
What’s your 2¢? Let’s chat.