GAINS FROM TRADE IMPLIES A VALUE PROPOSITION.

It's Sunday, so let me open today's sermon with an observation from British economist Edwin Cannan, who deconstructed the price-gouging rhetoric of a century ago with "Have we not all heard the preacher abuse his congregation because it is so small?"  That's an easy enough trap to fall into, particularly when the pews are full for Christmas, Easter, or the middle of a long drought.  Chicago's Cardinal Archbishop had a message last Christmas Eve that offered a value proposition.  "The point of going to church is to be there for the neighbor who has hit a rough patch, in order that those neighbors will be there when it's your turn to hit a rough patch."

In business or politics, you're unlikely to produce either shareholder value or electoral pluralities by running down potential customers or prospective constituents.

Take Bud Light.  (Please?)

Years from now, business schools will teach the case of Bud Light as a cautionary tale. Suggested course titles: How to Destroy Your Brand Without Really Trying, or Five Ways to Lose Customers by Picking ‘Influencers’. The question will be whether Bud Light still exists when universities and colleges try to analyze the disaster that Anheuser-Busch wrought with its market-leading and culturally popular product.

First, they alienated their traditional “fratty” customer base by partnering with transgender “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney in hopes of scoring some free social-media boosts, while their marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid publicly insulted customers by painting them as unsophisticated rubes. That got their customers inspired to drink anything but Bud Light and fueled conservative attacks on the whole A-B and InBev catalog of beverages.

Now, because Anheuser-Busch has abandoned its attempt to woo the transgender crowd, activists and leaders on the Left are demanding their own Bud Boycott.

I've long held a skeptical view of light beer and its marketing efforts, particularly at Super Bowl time.  It's a Prussian thing with me.  Deal with it.

Dear reader, is this the face that could sell colored water in blue cans to anybody?

Lots of contemporary business bafflegab saying nothing. But attempting to reposition beer, especially near-beer, in the snobs' food chain is hard. Yes, there's still a "champagne of bottled beer" line on the cans, which has provoked a trade spat with the Common Market, or whatever they're calling it these days.  Beginning with the "Miller Time" commercials, now going on fifty years ago, Miller have been attempting to scrub away the snob associations with Champagne.  "It is clearly a metaphor meant to denote the (alleged) high quality of Miller High Life beer, not to mislead consumers into thinking that the beer is literally champagne." (Miller also copyrighted and trademarked "Lite," but I digress.)

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey delivers the lesson.

This is what happens when corporations take sides in social debates — especially when their executives either don’t know their customer base, don’t like their customer base — or in Heinerscheid’s case, both. The ignorance in this is breathtaking, and on a core level. People buy and drink beer for fun, at least aspirationally (it can’t be for the taste). They’re not buying it to get lectures on “representation,” they’re not buying it for the “equity,” and they’re certainly not drinking it to toast Mulvaney’s “womanhood.”

That’s why all of the marketing campaigns that preceded Heinerscheid worked. That “fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor” appealed to consumers’ desire for fun, and the opportunity for social connections that fun presents. Those ad campaigns got designed by people who not just understood the consumer base for industrial-scale beer but actually kinda liked the people buying it. Or at least liked their money enough to refrain from pushing lectures on “representation” as a rebuke to their “out of touch humor” and their desire for fun over political battles.

Anheuser-Busch could have hired a hundred men and women off the street who would have figured that out in a heartbeat. Instead, they chose a Harvard English Lit major and a Wharton School post-grad who “took over Bud Light” and tried to remake in her social-conscience image — and ended up alienating everyone, including her putative allies. Now no one wants to drink their beer, because Anheuser-Busch’s woke push destroyed the fun for everyone.

Now all that’s left is a fight over who gets to claim credit for the corpse of Bud Light. I’m no Wharton School graduate, but that seems, y’know … bad for the future of Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch. Eventually all sides might forget about their anger, but Bud Light marched itself into a political and public-relations box canyon for no good reason at all and lost billions of dollars in making enemies across the spectrum. And it will be a very long time before consumers on any scale associate Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch products with “fun.”

I wonder if the lady's animus at frat culture is because she was propositioned by somebody on the Harvard hockey team, or because she wasn't propositioned by anybody on the Harvard hockey team.  I'll cut Captain Ed a little slack on that "taste" remark, he's out of Hugh Hewitt's old Minnesota-based Northern Alliance of webloggers, and he probably grew up on Hamms or the like.

It might be that wiser heads will prevail, even in St. Louis.

Robert Lachky, a former chief creative officer at Anheuser-Busch, said the decision to work with Mulvaney was a mistake, according to the Post-Dispatch.

“The minute you step into the political or religious spectrum, when you know your target audience is going to have a real issue with this, you know you’ve alienated at least half of your target audience,” he said. “People don’t like getting preached to, especially when it comes to drinking beer.”

Lachky said current marketers do not have a good feel for Bud Light’s customers.

”None of these marketing folks has ever been to a NASCAR race; none has been to a football game or a rodeo,” he said. “That’s insanity. That’s marketing incompetence.”

You'd thing somebody in brand positioning would have been aware of Charles Murray's "bubble" survey of years ago.

In politics, there's plenty of marketing incompetence to go around.  I've had a lot of fun mocking Democrats for their deplorable-shaming: and the cosmopolitans doing a brand repositioning of that colored water in blue cans is of a piece with it.  But Republicans are also missing a value proposition.  "For one, stop calling them 'snowflakes' and similarly derogatory names, even if that is exactly what they are. Would you vote for a candidate that constantly mocks and demeans you? Of course you wouldn’t. Why would young voters choose a party they believe is out of touch and holds them in contempt?"

They don't, although they will be left holding the bag when all that free stuff turns out not to be so free.