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A marketing executive for Bud Light said that the brand's image before she started working there was 'fratty' and relied on 'out-of-touch humor.' She said that she wanted to add 'inclusivity' to the brand.
After it was announced that Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender TikTok creator, would become a brand ambassador for the beer, clips from a podcast talk with Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing at Bud Light, were shared on social media.
Heinerschneid appeared on the Make Yourself at Home Podcast and discussed her plans to “evolve and elevate” the brand, which she argued had “been in decline” for some time when she started in her current role.
“I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light. And 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,” she said.
Specifically, she expressed a desire to “shift the tone” of the brand and make it “truly inclusive … lighter, and brighter, and different and [appealing] to women and to men.”
“Representation is at the heart of evolution,” she added.
She also took more pointed shots at efforts to market the brand that predated her tenure as its vice president of marketing, arguing that Bud Light’s public presentation had been based largely on “fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor.”
When Heinerschneid talked to Forbes in February about "bringing in a new era for Bud Light," she used similar language and put a lot of stress on "representation."
One clip from the podcast conversation on March 23 has been watched by about 4.2 million people on Twitter alone, and some users have doubts about how Heinerscneid plans to change the brand.
“Has she ever ordered a beer? I’m not really sure if she understands it. People go to a bar ordering Bud Light or Budweiser or something to that effect- Don’t sit there and wonder which beer offers the most value of inclusivity? LOL,” one user wrote.
“Gone from decline to spiraling … real executives of genius,” another user joked in response to Heinerscheid’s observation that the brand has previously been on the downswing.
In a comment to Fox News, a spokesperson for Anheuser-Busch, the company that owns Bud Light, said that the company was looking into the matter: “works with hundreds of influencers and the commemorative cans featuring Dylan Mulvaney’s face were “a gift to celebrate a personal milestone and is not for sale to the general public.”
