Is this Bud for you … really?
By Clark S. Judge, managing director.
In early June, on his primetime Fox News show, Sean Hannity probed the Budweiser transgender-and public-relations fiasco with Mark Penn.
Hannity holds cable television’s record as longest running prime time host and commentator. Penn polled for President Clinton, then built a major international marketing firm. Love or hate them, no truer experts in media and opinion could address how one of the world’s largest beverage manufacturers blundered into surrendering a quarter of its market cap in sixty days.
Hannity blamed a callous corporation making a political statement. Penn fingered non-stop social media attacks. Both were wrong. The corporate calamity highlights a clash of global cultures.
Beginning in the 1860s, the Busch family identified Budweiser with a segment of America -- factory workers, farmers, truckers, and so many others, proud men and women who worked hard, respected craft, cherished their children and communities, at once honored their roots overseas and the promised land their forbearers had found and contributed to building here.
In ways that were hard to articulate, the Clydesdale horse team spoke to all this, so after 2008, when the Busch family sold the business to a Belgium-Brazilian conglomerate, it was a sign of troubles to come that the new owners dropped the horses as a corporate symbol.
Based on their track record, could you find more clueless cosmopolitans than the current management team. Most likely a restiveness had been building among Budweiser followers for years before the transgender cans appeared and, though the Clydesdales are back, that restiveness is sure to remain.
Was launching the infamous can a corporate level decision? The first question is, was any corporate-level decision made at all? Did a social media swarm sink the stock-price ship? Did social media even matter?
Without those responsible knowing it, a sense of oneness of the brand with the people had been shattered. Even though the stock price is recovering, what took over a century and a half to build will take more than a few ads to restore – if it can be restored.
Communication is a multifaceted and textured thing. It is not just data points on a market researcher’s graphs. It may be a science. It is also a very human art.