The Budweiser Controversy – Is There "Lite" At the End of the Tunnel?

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On Good Friday, we at History, Rinse, & Repeat ran a short piece on the burgeoning Budweiser controversy, in which Bud Light, the top-selling beer brand in this country, engaged a transgender Tik Tok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, to be a company spokesman.  The decision has caused widespread controversy, has led to a boycott of the Bud Light brand, if not other Anheuser-Busch products, and has granted Bud Light’s VP for Marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, an unfortunate, Warholesque fifteen minutes of fame, principally as a result of statements she made, several months ago in an interview for a podcast, concerning the marketing strategy she sought to replace.  Remarkably, the controversy refuses to go away and continues to boil over on numerous newscasts. 

Having previously addressed the issue, it might appear self-indulgent for a blog, which purports to write about history and politics, to revisit what is an arguably trivial, and likely to be transitory news story.  However, this author has had a long, personal interest in beer and its history, not just because he was previously a long-time member of a Beer of the Month Club, but because, having once litigated and tried (unsuccessfully) a lawsuit against the Coors family, he can finally put his extensive background research to more productive use.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the brouhaha as entirely trivial, or to focus merely upon its woke elements.  To do so would risk failing to understand why, to the bewilderment of many, Mulvaney’s selection has engendered such hostility and rage. 

In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, political scientist Charles Murray wrote of the growing divide between two segments of the white population in this country.  He argued that there was a growing caste fracture between the upper class, the inhabitants of Belmont,  and the working class, which lived in Fishtown.  He further argued that, due to the increasingly insular lifestyle of the former -- members live among themselves, go to school among themselves, and marry among themselves -- this divide was only going to get worse.  The controversy over a beer advertisement is a reflection of how wide this divide has become, and raises the question of whether our elite institutions are exacerbating this divide.

It is no coincidence that a beer commercial has been the catalyst for such a moment of national introspection.  The history of beer, and, more particularly the history of beer advertising, provides a unique perspective to understand why what seems to be an inconsequential marketing decision has struck such a national nerve.  Beer advertising, for the past fifty years, has consciously sought to capture the American mood, to provide a mirror to the American zeitgeist.  The current controversy provides a lens through which to analyze whether that mirror has permanently fractured.

The Evolving Beer Industry

Up until World War II, the suggestion that the beer industry might mirror the national mood would seem preposterous.  After Prohibition, there were over 700 breweries around the country, and while there were national brewers such as Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst, beer production and consumption was dominated by regional brewers.  In New York alone, in the early sixties, at least five brewers provided the majority of that city’s beer needs -- Rheingold, Schaeffer, Piels, Ballantine, and Knickerbocker -- brewers who are now all extinct except as nostalgic trademarks.  Other well-known local brands included Carling Black Label, Schmidt’s, Falstaff, and Stroh’s.  Nevertheless, even then, the consolidation that was to characterize the beer industry had already begun.  There were two early factors in this consolidation.  The first was the ability of brewers to use cans to store their beer.  Prior to Prohibition, 85% of beer had been sold from casks in local taverns. Beer companies had sold bottled beer, but it was a minor market as it was much more expensive than draft beer.   At the same time beer was being marketed in cans, American homes began, on a widespread basis, to acquire refrigerators, allowing consumers to store the beer that they had acquired.  Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst were the first breweries to seize upon the opportunity presented by these trends, and, as a result, they were the first to approach the status of national brewers.

The second factor was the revolution in beer advertising.  Beer companies had always advertised, particularly attaching their names to sporting events. Narragansett beer sponsored the first telecasts of Red Sox games, Ballantine sponsored the Yankees, and Rheingold was so closely associated with the Mets that the “H” and the “E” in the beer company’s scoreboard advertisement at the ballpark were used to inform spectators whether a particular play had been ruled a hit or an error.  Thereafter, in the fifties, beer spokesmen had become the norm, including the Hamm bear, Carling’s beer-slinging waitress, Mabel, and our personal favorite, Bert and Harry Piel, the fictional, cartoon owners of Piels Brewery, who were voiced by the legendary comedy team of Bob and Ray.  But through most of the sixties, beer advertising emphasized taste; a beer’s flavor was the only source of distinction, which made it hard for advertisers to move the needle, as most Americans did not feel that there was a significant difference among the varying brands.  That was to change beginning in 1971.

It's Miller Time

For every generation except the Baby Boomers, it is hard to imagine how peripheral a role that Miller Brewing, now the No. 2 brewer in the nation, played in the beer firmament as the seventies began.  The maker of only one product, Miller High Life, Miller was the seventh ranked brewer in America, its sales exceeded not just by the big three of Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst, but also by regional brewers such as Coors, Falstaff, and Schaeffer.  Its sleepy slogan, “The Champagne of Bottled Beer,” suited a niche brand and was not one calculated to entice mass consumers.

As recounted in Daniel Baum’s book, Citizen Coors, the beer revolution began in 1971, when Miller was acquired by the cigarette manufacturer, Philip Morris, and that company’s No. 2 officer, John Murphy, was appointed the CEO.  Murphy was born in the Bronx, the son of Irish immigrants.  He attended Villanova and then Columbia Law School.  He had spent his career marketing cigarettes, and he took that know-how to his role with Miller.

Murphy’s first step was to fire almost the entire senior management of the company.   His next step was to change the taste of the beer he was selling.  Murphy recognized a fundamental fact that drove the beer market, one discovered by Adolph Coors decades before --  that most American beer drinkers did not like the taste of beer.  Baum quoted Adolph Coors, Jr., who led Coors Brewing into the modern era:

“You take a young person. He wants to drink beer but he really doesn't like the taste very much because of the bitterness of the hops. That can be scientifically measured, by the way, in bitterness units. We strive for lower bitterness units in part to attract that young beer drinker. Because when he then tastes one of our competitors, it will taste too bitter and he'll come back to us."

Coors addressed this problem by brewing a beer that was (famously) lighter and less bitter, using rice as an additive (an additive also employed by Budweiser).  Murphy similarly thought Miller High Life to be too heavy and bitter, and he changed Miller’s formula to be more like Coors.

The third step that Murphy took was to expand the number of varietals that Miller beer offered.  Much of Philip Morris’s success with cigarettes lay in the number of different brands that the company offered.  Murphy sought to duplicate this approach at Miller.  One new brand he proposed was Miller Lite.  Murphy had been on a business trip to Germany with the Chairman of Philip Morris who, trying to lose weight, ordered a “Diat” beer – a low sugar pilsener that was drunk by diabetics.  Murphy took a sip and determined it to be a product that would sell in America.

Fortuitously for Murphy, Miller already owned the recipe to brew such a beer.  Light beer had been invented by a chemist, employed by Rheingold, who determined how to remove higher-calorie starches from the brewing process.  The beer was marketed as Gablinger’s Diet Beer, but was a complete flop; no one wanted diet beer.  Meister Brau, a local Chicago brewer, acquired the recipe for Gablinger’s, sold the beer as Meister Brau Lite, but it too discovered that no one wanted a diet beer.  It took Murphy to find the answer.

While each of the first three steps were significant, they paled in comparison to the fourth step.  Murphy revolutionized how beer was marketed, and to what extent.  Murphy began by commissioning an extensive analysis of the beer market.  He discovered that 30% of beer drinkers were blue collar men.  More significantly, he discovered that this 30% drank 80% of the nation’s beer.  So he determined to target that market.  As a spokeswoman for Miller stated upon his death:  ''John was the one who said Miller High Life had to come out of the champagne bucket and into the lunch bucket without spilling a drop.  He was the one who realized that we had to transition that whole image of Miller High Life into the working man's beer.''

Having recognized that Miller needed to alter its target market, Murphy also recognized that Miller needed to change how it sold to that market.  He discovered that these blue-collar beer drinkers did not place a high premium on how the beer tasted; they responded more to advertisements that reflected them and their lifestyle.  Baum writes:

[Murphy] and his ad agency — McCann-Erickson — intuited that these workingmen didn't really want to hear about beer. They wanted to hear about themselves. They didn't just want a passably drinkable beer from a brewery; they also wanted thirty- second movies with themselves as the star. So in 1972, Murphy ordered a series of upbeat ads depicting ordinary Joes — welders, cowboys, factory hands — coming off a hard day's work and heading for the corner bar. "If you've got the time," the ads offered, "we've got the beer." The beer drinker, not the beer, was the centerpiece of the ads, and beer drinkers lapped it up. Miller High Life, repositioned from "champagne" to friend of the working man, sat up in its coffin. Beer marketing would never be the same again.  

Murphy brought this same strategy to Miller Lite.  Testing showed that as soon as it was positioned as a diet beer, consumer interest waned.  So, Murphy changed tack, introducing a concept that would be core part of Miller Lite’s advertising -- that it was less filling.  As a consequence, consumers could drink more.

Ironically, Murphy feared that Miller Lite would be characterized as a woman’s beer, so he adopted the marketing strategy that would make Miller Lite famous – employing well-known athletes, particularly those, such as Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith, who had a reputation for tough masculinity.  The ads evolved to include the quarrels among the athletes and other figures, such as Mickey Spillane and Rodney Dangerfield, as to whether the appeal of Miller Lite was that it was “less filling” or that it “taste[d] great.”  The commercials all concluded with one of the most masterful tag lines – “Everything you wanted in a beer, and less.”  Miller augmented its new strategy by massively increasing its marketing budget to levels previously unseen in the beer industry.

The results of Miller’s marketing were sensational.  Miller went from No. 7 in the country to No. 2.  Budweiser kept its top spot only by adopting Miller’s strategy and outspending Miller on marketing.  Coors remained competitive only by merging with Molson Brewing.  None of the other seven beers who were in the Top 10 fifty years ago, when this author started drinking beer (legally) are still in business.

The Enigma of Bud Light

Given the history of beer advertising, addressed in our Good Friday post, This Bud’s Not for Everyone, the choice of Dylan Mulvaney seems a jarring juxtaposition and raises the inevitable question -- if beer commercials are intended to be a mirror upon America and to enable beer drinkers to see themselves, how could a savvy corporation, whose success depends to an inordinate degree on marketing, choose as a reflection of America a figure so far from the mainstream?  To what market was the choice of Dylan Mulvaney intended to appeal, and did any analysis suggest that the potential reward achievable in that market was equal to the risk that Bud Light’s choice potentially entailed to its core market?  It is understandable that beer companies are reaching out to women and other potentially new markets, but none has done it in as ham-handed way as Bud Light.  For example, Heineken has several ads featuring women in connection with soccer’s Champions League competition, including one clever one in which a man, dining out, checks the game on his phone when his date goes to the restroom, only to realize, when he hears her scream after a goal is scored, that she went there for the same purpose.

Critics of Bud Light argue that “wokeism” is to blame.  Relying primarily on a video clip available on the internet in which Ms. Heinerscheid characterized Bud Light’s prior advertising as “fratty,” they suggest that she “hates her customers.”  However, this would appear wrong for two reasons.  First, Bud Light is not the only brand embracing wokeism.  For example,  Miller Lite has had its own struggle session, denouncing its former advertising as “sexist” and announcing an initiative, “Bad S#it to Good S#it,” in which it solicits examples of such advertising in order to convert it into fertilizer for hops.  Miller Lite’s marketing director, Elizabeth Hitch, explained:  

"This Women's History Month, Miller Lite wanted to recognize that without women, there would be no beer," said Elizabeth Hitch, senior director of marketing for Miller Lite. "To honor this we wanted to acknowledge the missteps in representation of women in beer advertising by cleaning up not just our $#!T, but the whole industry's $#!T while benefiting the future of women and beer."

Secondly, it is in no way apparent that either Bud Light or Miss Heinerscheid hates their customers.  Although the latter’s  use of the term “fratty” was undeniably condescending, it was seemingly the only moment of condescension in the entire one-hour interview from which it was excised.  Anyone watching the entire interview in the hope that he will hate her will be sorely disappointed; she comes off as sincere and caring – about her co-workers, her family, and other women in her profession.

Far more telling is her other characterization of Bud Light’s advertising as “out-of-touch.”  The humor of not just Bud Light ads, but of arguably the majority of beer ads, can be undeniably sophomoric.  Yet it is revealing that Ms. Heinerscheid regards the sophomoric humor of traditional beer ads to be out-of-touch, and the selection of Dylan Mulvaney to be, in some way, mainstream.

This fissure between what Ms. Heinerscheid perceives as mainstream versus what Bud Light’s consumers perceive is clear a manifestation of the fissure in society that Murray identified in his book.  This fissure is reflected in the remainder of Ms. Heinerscheid’s interview in which the internet has expressed little interest.

 Ms. Heinerscheid is the living embodiment of those who inhabit Murray’s Belmont:  she is married, devoted to her family, and works hard.  She attended elite universities -- Harvard and Wharton --  and married a husband who attended the same schools.  The world she inhabits is reflected in the expressions she uses: “joy box,” “worry box,” “comfort space” and “happy place.”  She does not challenge herself, she “runs to the hard.”  She engages in “Value System” exercises, and, based upon her favorite course at Harvard, entitled “Happiness,” she has her team members keep a “happiness notebook” to record when they are happy.  She acknowledges that, as a businesswoman, her objective is the “bottom line,” yet she talks obsessively about the dominance of men in her profession (although a picture of her team suggests it is predominantly women), and she discussed how important it was to have a female choreographer.  None of this is a criticism or warrants the scorn that has been unfairly heaped upon her.  But whether this worldview, which is articulated in jargon and catch phrases, comes from the elite institutions she attended or the industry in which she works, it reflects, as Murray has written, that Ms. Heinerscheid inhabits a far different world than the Fishtown her customers inhabit.

As a consequence, those who believe a boycott in opposition to wokeism will serve as a cautionary tale to other “woke” corporations, may be overly optimistic.  Many of those in corporate America who force their companies to embrace progressive positions are not opportunists grabbing wokeism as a transitory tool; they have a worldview that is ingrained in their being.  As Murray surmises, the problem runs much deeper, and the prognosis is far worse.