MAGA fans call for boycott of Dunkin Donuts: ‘The Bud Lite treatment’

jeffw@lemmy.worldmod to News@lemmy.world – 214 points –
MAGA fans call for boycott of Dunkin Donuts: ‘The Bud Lite treatment’
independent.co.uk
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The Bud Light one was actually impactful for several months:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Light_boycott

"On June 3, Brayden King, a professor of management and organizations, gave an interview to CNBC calling the Bud Light boycott an outlier in the right's attack on "woke capitalism" because it is the first one to actually harm the company's sales. King studied 133 political boycotts from 1990 to 2005 and none of them accounted for more than a 1% drop in sales for a company; the Bud Light boycott had resulted in an estimated 18% drop in all AB InBev sales."

Interesting. I had assumed it went like the other 133 that source mentions.

Wonder if there's just an extremely over-sized overlap between conservatives who were going to be offended about and willing to boycott and people who drink cheap beer that led to that statistically unusual outcome.

Also maybe cheap beer is cheap beer and there's limited enough brand loyalty that other types of products don't?

Cheap beer and Bud being #1 for 20 years made the fall more dramatic.

If it were some no-name beer, nobody would have cared.

I do find it hilarious that by abandoning Bud this "America First" crowd let Modelo into the top spot. LOL.

https://www.gearpatrol.com/drinks/modelo-bestselling-beer/

Modelo, owned by... AB InBev.

Kind of...

"Although AB InBev did have to sell the U.S. distribution rights to Modelo to rival Constellation Brands as the result of an anti-trust suit in 2013, one could still make the argument that Anheuser-Busch still technically retains its top ranking since it still owns the Modelo brand."

They just don't have US distribution.

I don't think there was any real strong attachment to it. It was a recognizable go-to cheap beer. But nowadays there's dozens of cheap light beers, and seltzers, and mixed drinks in a can, and ciders, and I can go on.

It was the fact that Bud Light openly advertised using a trans person. It was an image that could be flaunted and would rally even moderate republicans.

An executive respectfully writing a response detailing why they would not want their brand associated with a platform that had extreme right wing views is much harder to rally around…

Fundamentally it’s because there is no convenient image to rally behind… they would have to read and think to be outraged.

When they figure out how to use AI to generate picture book propaganda for their followers, watch out. (Wait, is that why they are obsessed with meme images...)

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