Bud Light, which reportedly saw a catastrophic drop in sales just prior to the Fourth of July weekend, still doesn't seem to get it.
Here's their latest ad, featuring their customers in the act of grunting:
They are male, they are hetero, but they aren't exactly classy or uplifting as the cameras focus on a few pot bellies along with grunts away for the cameras.
It would seem to go against basic marketing principles, as customers like to feel uplifted about their purchase of a product, not insulted, which was why Budweiser's Clydesdale horse ads in the past have been so effective.
Now it's "Easy to Drink. Easy to Enjoy," but not easy on the eyes.
It follows another ad which depicted the typical Bud Light customer as some kind of bumbler.
In both ads, the customers are depicted not as heroes but as oafs. Just as customers are turned off by the sarcastic endorsement of a female impersonator who clearly doesn't drink that brand of beer, they're also turned off by an ad that depicts themselves as self-satisfied losers making hog noises before drinking that beer.
An approach like that might be do-able to a comfortable customer base that feels fine with making fun of itself, but not an offended one that's still waiting for its apology.
That may be why ad sales have fallen in the runup to this weekend, despite the company tripling its ad budget, and is likely to mean more trouble as sales reports from the Fourth of July weekend are released.
Sure, they fired their marketing vice president, whose remarks about the perceived "fratty" nature of their customers pretty well indicated her contempt for the customers she was managing ads for.
But because the counterproductive and insulting ads are continuing, it suggests that the problem went deeper than her and her immediate boss, who also got canned.
For one thing, the company's apology was not a particularly complete or convincing one.
But perhaps their problem is also that they are still focusing their ads on what they think the personalities of beer drinkers are instead of the beer itself.
It's telling that the beer company that has replaced them for the title of top-selling beer in America, Modelo Especial, is a Mexican brand of all things with an untranslated name, a fascinating detail that breaks the jingoist stereotype of Bud Light customers. Modelo Especial also doesn't do much in the way of memorable ads, and is primarily known for its high quality brew.
If Bud Light wants to recover, they might try to look at what Modelo Especial does and try to catch up with that model, focusing less on personalities and more on whatever quality Bud Light may have, because the Modelo Especial rise is obviously about a higher quality brew rather than the images depicting what Bud Light thinks about its customers. That would have to be news to Bud Light, which has never suspected that its customers might be looking for something more in beer than cutesy depictions of themselves as bumblers. They've moved on to quality.