We are in this very weird era in which long-standing brands have decided to actively drive away their core customers by courting a customer base that does not really exist.

Of course, we know much of that is due to ESG (environmental and social governance standards) policies that have been incrementally changing the corporate landscape since the early 2000s. Once a private, low-key grading scale, it has now been exposed more widely as GenZ moves into the corporate world and brings their political religion with them.

Some of this ridiculousness can also be laid at the feet of stupidity and weak minds, embodied by the cult of “fluidity” that has absolutely no understanding of human nature…or biology, for that matter.

The recent Bud Light branding controversy is a great example of what happens when a successful, billion-dollar company hands over their marketing to the ESG generation, people who have never built anything but have loads of opinions on the right way to build a business and maintain it as a successful, profitable property. It is one thing to engage ESG frameworks within the boardroom, it is quite another to allow such frameworks to become more important than the customer. Yes, ESG indexes attract socially conscious investors, but who will invest in a product that has no one to buy it?

RedState’s Nick Arama reported on Bud Light’s recent decision to put marketing vice president Alissa Heinerscheid on a “leave of absence” after her disastrous Dylan Mulvaney campaign. The company’s big wigs claimed they knew nothing about Heinerscheid’s marketing plan. However, their non-apology apology didn’t do much to inspire the confidence of the beer’s best buyers, particularly when a video of their marketing guru spelling out her plans for the brand resurfaced.

One of the things that brought the controversy into sharp focus was a video from a podcast with Alissa Heinerscheid, the marketing vice president for Bud Light since 2022. She did the podcast just before the controversy with Mulvaney, but it explained everything about how they could have gone down such a bad road. Heinerscheid described how she was trying to change the brand, to make it more “inclusive” and bring in younger people.

“We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out of touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach,” she said. They certainly did take “another approach” and talk about being “out of touch.” I think it’s cost them big time.

But there’s a little more to the story of how this insane campaign sounded like a good idea to marketing VP in the first place, and it is a prime example of why everything seems so absurd these days. It is directly correlated to the weak minds being released from our institutions of higher learning.

I came across an analysis of that podcast with Heinerscheid on YouTube, from an account I’ve been obsessed with off and on for a few years. Body Language Ghost (BLG) is a fascinating account run by a body language expert who typically takes clips from viral interviews or stories and dissects the subtle language of the body for clues to the truthfulness of the subject. She did a great one on the Prince Andrew interview a while back, and there’s an analysis of the Christine Blasey Ford testimony during the Kavanaugh hearings that is riveting. Obviously it is just one person’s opinion, and perhaps a different professional might come to different conclusions, but at the very least it is entertaining. At most, it is shockingly illuminating.

Regardless of how seriously you choose to take a “YouTube expert,” what BLG picked out of the Heinerscheid interview definitely added another layer to revelation of how the poorly-planned marketing shift made it to fruition.

“There’s a part of this interview that sums it up perfectly on why she makes the decision she makes…this part in and of itself should tell you everything you need to know.”

What does the vapid vice president say that is such a perfect summary?

Without giving away too much of BLG’s brilliant commentary, in a nutshell, Heinerscheid is exhibiting the same type of behavior found in some cults. What is her particular cult? As it turns out, the Bud VP has herself a “professional coach.” As BGL describes it,

“This is someone she pays to tell her what to think, what beliefs she has, what is right and wrong. She’s looking off camera to remember exactly what her professional coach, technically we should all call it her ‘handler,’ has told her.”

As the video progresses, BGL drops some pretty provocative revelations about Heinerscheid’s decision-making process as evidenced in the hidden language of her body, not the words of her mouth. BGL points out that when speaking of her professional coach, she becomes animated, shifting her posture to a straighter, higher position, indicating she holds her “handler’s” ideas in higher esteem than her own. When shifting back into expressing her own thoughts or personal experience, Heinerscheid’s body language shrinks and retreats.

She has adopted the beliefs of the handler as her own. Her body says, “This is my new narrative, my new personality.” It is very open. The hands are splayed open. This is her [the handler’s] openness.

The entire analysis is about five minutes, and well worth a watch. It says so much about how this woman could have made such a gross miscalculation in a job that requires her to be realistic and knowledgable about best marketing practices.  Heinerscheid is an example of a generation that has been so intellectually weakened and so morally hobbled that they struggle to think for themselves at all. They crave the leadership and guidance they were denied growing up, both at home and in their educational institutions, so they seek pay someone to do it in their adulthood. Their delayed adulthood has left them riddled with confusion. They are paying for the process of maturing.

However, the “professional coaching” field only has so many coaches to go around, and they are coaches who base their techniques in weakest ideas that have been floating to the top of academia. The result is this – a relatively few amount of strong-willed people fill their brains with weak ideas, and then thrust those weak ideas upon the weak-willed people who have never been trained in critical thinking.

How did this marketing VP make such a ridiculous decision?

Someone told her to.

Life in America is going to get a lot easier when the adults in the room finally decide to step up.