Honey, Do I Like This?

One quiet morning, way, way back in my restaurant days, our chef came out of the kitchen to take a break me over a couple cups of coffee. With a disgusted look on his face, he related a shopping excursion he had undertaken with his wife the previous afternoon.

The source of his disgust? A man, middle-aged as he was, holding a sweater up to his chin and asking his wife, "Honey, do I like this?"

I haven't weighed in on the Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney marketing debacle yet, but this bit of memory percolated up as I read a National Review piece on the second executive defenestration at Anheuser-Busch.

Contained therein was a quote from the first-defenestrated, vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid.

I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light. It was, this brand is in decline, it’s been in decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light.

I took the league-minimum number of marketing classes in business school, but still recall one declaration therefrom: "you can't make people buy something they don't want to buy." Or, by extension, make them like something they don’t.

My skeptical reaction, then and now: "but you can sure try..."

Disclaimer time: The next paragraph is personal opinion. Your mileage may vary, and I obviously won’t deny you your right to drink what you want. I do reserve the right to raise an eyebrow…

Bud Light is swill. It's, in a nod to Monty Python, "like making love in a canoe... It's f***ing close to water." Heck, it's not even really beer , at least by the standard that is the German Reinheitsgebot. It's made with rice. It's crap. It's sewage. It’s thrice-recycled bath water. It’s unfit even for beer-pong-frat-boy consumption.

Back in the BC days (in this case, that's Before Carter, who liberated the beer industry in America), most beer options available to Americans would qualify as swill by modern standards. While I'm not fond of the trends and excesses of the modern microbrew mania (seriously - take your quadruple IPAs and shove 'em. And sours? Nyet), I love the wild variety of beers out there. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, at the onset of the microbrew explosion, my friends and I would pub-crawl from McSorley's to Jekyll and Hyde every third or fourth Saturday evening (with multiple stops along the way, and a coda at Wo Hop at 3 AM), we sampled hundreds and hundreds of different beers, and figured out over time what we each liked and didn't like.

That's the point here - we figured out for ourselves what each of us judged as "good."

A-B clued into the fact that beer tastes have evolved. Included in its family of brands are Hoegaarden, Blue Point, Goose Island, Red Hook, and other labels I enjoy to varying degrees, along with such as Stella Artois that I am not personally a fan of but don't mock.

Know what I do mock, beyond rice-beers? Starbucks.

I drink my coffee unadulterated. Straight-up black, no sugar, no flavors, no syrups, no besmirchments of any kind. To me, Starbucks coffee is burnt swill (yes, I repeat the "S" word, but when it fits, it fits). I'm not alone in this assessment, and I figure the wide popularity of the product has a lot to do with a huge number of its drinkers preferring it besmirched and masked with sugars, fats, and other flavors. It's thus a tribute to marketing, especially toward the young who are more prone to wanting to be in on what's popular and trendy. Starbucks told people “this is what you should like,” quite successfully.

Most people I know hated the taste of their first beers. Most people I know weren't up to drinking unsweetened black coffee on first attempt. That's a normal bit of reality - some tastes are acquired. But, that doesn't mean that taste is utterly arbitrary. As with art, if it were, we would never agree on what's good.

What's my point here? The marketers' efforts to take Bud Light out of its lane. Swill or not, there are a LOT of people who drink the stuff - to the tune of 27 million barrels a year (Boston Brewing Company, maker of Sam Adams, one of the biggest “craft beers",” produces 8M barrels a year across its entire brand spectrum). Trying to divorce it from "its “fratty” roots and out-of-touch humor" (out of touch to who?) is in essence a betrayal of its core constituency. It's an effort to tell all those frat boys and other Bud Light drinkers that they are wrong-thinkers who need to woke up - without granting the possibility that they are already live-and-let-live sorts who may nevertheless bristle at the ham-fisting of ideology into their spaces. The great sin of the Best-and-Brightest is assuming a default bigotry in everyone who isn't already in their safe-space silo.

Today there are over thirteen thousand breweries in America, each making multiples or dozens of different beers (again, thanks to Jimmy Earl Carter). It is inevitable that such legacy brands as Bud Light would have lost market share with the growth of the beer industry. Bud Light is in competition with other "macro" beers, and a quick Internet search (A B C D E) suggests it ranks very low, taste-wise, in that space.

What should A-B do about the brand? As I noted, I wasn't a marketing major, and barring a fundamental change in its formulation (which would also be an affront to its constituency - see New Coke), I won't drink the stuff, at least in its current form. So, I’ve no “do this” to offer. Creatives at ad agencies get paid to be creative. I do figure that honoring the core drinkers should be part of the campaign, however, as in “don’t alienate your base.” Inclusion, not abandonment in hopes of capturing a new market segment. And, let's be honest, the woke and hipster and similar crowds aren't going to "regress" to bum juice (see disclaimer) just because of some woke marketing campaign. Besides, A-B's late to that game - Pabst Blue Ribbon has already laid claim to the retro-hipster segment.

As for the broader picture here? Try as they might, marketers can push our taste buds only so far. Marketers can get people to try new things, they can get the status crowd to buy into labels above personal taste, but they can’t get people to enjoy drinking goat piss or gasoline. There are limits to people being told what they should like. Or what they should think or what they should say or what they should believe.

Ms. Heinerscheid apparently didn't count on Bud Light's customer base objecting to ham-fisted woke-ifyig of their preferred swill. This solipsistic arrogance has appeared in too many instances to count, and those who keep making the mistake likely believe that the blow-back is nothing more than bigotry. They don’t (or refuse to) understand that Americans are quite wonderful when left to sort things voluntarily, and that if simply given time and space grow their acceptance and tear away old biases. But Americans are incredibly resistant to being pushed, that things which they'd do voluntarily they reject outright when demanded or coerced. "Tell me what I like" is not the American paradigm.