Go Woke? Go Broke!

The latest sensational story of the ongoing culture wars is the sordid tale of Dylan Mulvaney, Alissa Heinerscheid, and the self-immolation of the Bud Light brand by Anheuser Busch. Our Dutch correspondent H. Numan examines the crisis from a larger commercial and cultural perspective.

Go woke? Go broke!

by H. Numan

Folks, I’m a bit of a beer aficionado and I studied marketing. I was also lucky enough to live close to the biggest specialty beer store in the city and close to Belgium where they have the largest variety and best beers in the world. I don’t drink beer to quench my thirst, but as a hobby. I find the whole ruckus around Bud Light hilarious and sad at the same time. Sad how this could happen, hilarious in that Anheuser Busch really believes they can get away with it.

Don’t get me wrong here. America is great, except for its beers. Your beers are the rock bottom end. Lite beers are proof you can’t go any lower, otherwise they’d have done it. I have sampled beers from around the world, in every country I have been to. American beers — with the exception of specialty beers and micro breweries — are lacking in any kind of flavoring. It’s mass marketed to the biggest audience possible. Lite beers are even worse. In Europe it would be considered a children’s drink. Actually, a Snow White or Shandy is just that: a glass with ⅓ beer, ⅔ lemonade, usually 7 Up or Sprite. It contains less alcohol than a lite beer, and is often served within the family to children and teenagers. My parents were teetotalers but Shandy was okay. We got one glass on occasion.

American beers used to be better, a lot better. Then came Prohibition, which bankrupted most breweries. After Prohibition only the biggest brewers survived. They decided to consolidate their position by going for quantity, not quality. This strangely, mysteriously even, was a decision they all took. Of course that wasn’t a cartel. The very idea! We all decided at the same time that we would lower the quality as low as the customer is willing to accept. Purely coincidental.

In the ’70s the biggest player dropped out: Schlitz. Many reasons why, but a big one was that Schlitz started to use corn syrup and chemicals to cut the corners. The other brewers learned a lesson: don’t tell anyone! All of them at the same time came up a bit later with a beer that is barely a beer: lite beers. Less alcohol with the cheapest ingredients possible.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Americans have been drinking sub-standard beers for well over a century. You are used to bland beers, just as I am used to bland Dutch food. I don’t particularly like spicy Thai food — for the same reason. I’m used to bland food.

When a company can lose $7 billion without going bankrupt immediately, and even try to pretend nothing bad has happened, they must have very deep pockets. In reality, the profit margin on beer is low. Especially on lite beers. Economy of scale makes up for it. The profit per glass is just a penny or so, certainly not a dime. The volume makes it all not only worthwhile, but immensely profitable. That’s economy of scale.

It’s very difficult to enter such a market. You need sufficient buyers for your new product. That means marketing, and marketing is expensive. You can’t get enough buyers because you don’t have the money for marketing. You won’t get the money because they competition operates on razor thin margins. It’s a closed market.

But it works both ways. The brewers have closed the beer market; the drinkers require the drinks they are accustomed to. Brewers aren’t worried about foreign brands. Sure, Heineken (a mediocre Dutch brand) is widely available. But it doesn’t sell in the same league. Nor will it ever. Because of the price difference, the taste and the alcohol content.

That brings us to the market. Who drinks Bud Light? As Ms. Alissa Heinerscheid knows and resents, mostly frat boys and blue-collar workers. They have different reasons for drinking flavored water. The frat boys (and frat girls, hi Alissa!) want to drink as much as possible. Blue-collar workers like a couple of beers after work to relax without getting drunk.

So, economy of scale works fine for the American market. Both producers and consumers are happy. That’s all that matters.

Let’s have a look at marketing. Years ago I saw the very first soap commercial broadcast on Dutch TV, now 60 years ago. It is exactly the same as today! Yes, the clothing is updated, the speech is updated, the kitchen is updated. Father doesn’t wear a hat anymore, nor does he smoke a pipe. The message is exactly the same. Almost word for word. Why?

Quite simply, because no one came up with something better. Countless advertising agencies spent all their time and effort on it. If they could have come up with something that sells better, they would have done it.

Exactly the same goes for beer advertising. Beer doesn’t make you a tall handsome guy with stunningly beautiful girls in a fast car. However, that is what sells. Hence the boringly similar adds. Clients simply expect it. Some companies are very good at using humor. Budweiser and Heineken were at times very good in making funny commercials. It’s extremely difficult to change a working marketing strategy into something completely different; targeting a vastly different audience is almost impossible.

That’s where Anheuser Busch and Ms. Heinerscheid fell flat on their pretentious upper-class faces. The boss of Anheuser may deny whatever he wants, but he is the guy with the huge paycheck and extra bonuses. He is ultimately responsible. If only for hiring this spiteful condescending crone and approving her hare-brained plan.

Women often and loudly complain they are not represented in the boardroom. That’s not fair, or even remotely justified. Big companies do everything they can to keep competent women. They really want women in the boardrooms. The problem is that not every woman or man wants to be there. It takes a special kind of human, and those are not the nicest persons to be around.

To become Marketing VP you have to do a lot more than show up from 9 to 5. You work comes first. Period. You work weekends. A problem must be solved, even if it takes you until 3 AM or the whole week. Sleep on the couch in your office. If you’re not willing to do that, your assistant manager will be more than happy to stick a knife in your back. You don’t get overtime. You work. 80 hours per week, if it’s a quiet week. Yes, you’ll easily make ten times what an ordinary employee makes. But not for free; you’ll earn every penny of it. Slip up just once, and out you go. No union for you.

Most men and nearly all women don’t want to do that. The few that do are fiercely competitive. They play to win! For men, that’s not a problem. They can marry later, and have their wife take care of the kids most of the time. Women are time-restricted. The clock ticks. After 30 the ticking gets louder and louder. After 35, it fades away together with the ability to give birth. Boys and girls, do remember that most executives at that level are rarely younger than 40. More usual is 50 years and over. Ms. Heinerscheid at 37 is an exception, just to get a woman on board.

Being a strong independent woman is a dream that nearly always ends in a nightmare. Men don’t want strong independent women. Being chewed out at work is enough already; no need for the same at home as well.

Strong, independent and bright women with the drive for it, like Ms. Heinerscheid, have to sacrifice everything for their careers. Which they do. Only to discover that when they have reached a position of influence and affluence men are no longer interested. Then they realize they wasted their lives, and start blaming anyone for it. Mostly men, never themselves. Ms. Heinerscheid is a great example of that.

How about setting up day care, extended parental leave, flexible working, that sort of thing? That doesn’t work. Not at senior levels. You can’t do that kind of work part-time. 80+ hours is not a part-time job. If you take parental leave, you’re out of the race. Forever. You can’t make up a gap of several years. Sure, you’ll get a decent position when you come back, but you will never reach the top.

Enter Ms. Heinerscheid, the Captain Schettino of Anheuser Busch. Both caused a tremendous amount of damage. Both can’t possibly pay back even a fraction of it. Schettino did it to impress his girlfriend. Heinerscheid did it because she is always right, never wrong. She will get fired, for sure. No company will ever hire here again, not with that track record. A cat lady in the making. With purebred cats, of course. But a cat lady all the same.

I don’t know her, but I’ve seen enough. She looks down on anyone she considers inferior. That means anyone who didn’t graduate from Harvard with honors. She isn’t the prettiest of women; at best average. She resents being reminded of her own frat girl days. She is woke as hell, and that includes being an extreme feminist as well. She probably resents having to work for something as lowly as a beer company, and then managing the cheapest brand in it. Hence her drive to change everything to the way she wants it. Almost certainly a long-term marketing employee, say the equivalent of a sergeant-major, politely said: Ma’am, I wouldn’t do that. Her reaction would be what a snotty lieutenant would do: chew him out and ignore him. She’s too short in her position to make that man suffer, fortunately.

The boss of Anheuser is fully responsible for hiring her, and for approving her campaign. He probably hand-picked her himself. The ax is not hovering over the neck of Ms. Heinerscheid alone. They can walk hand in hand to the scaffold. There is plenty of blame to share.

His apology is even worse. He isn’t apologizing at all, merely whining that his despicable customers should think about the poor men and women who brew this stuff. He reminds them of something he himself is as proud about as Jane Fonda: America and all it stands for. That is not an apology, but an excuse. Just like his beer, a weak excuse.

Will this boycott last? No idea; it is a grassroots movement. Some succeed, most don’t. In financial terms, most businesses would have been bankrupt already, but Anheuser Busch is so big, a $7+ billion loss barely registers. I get the impression that the big boss wants to battle it out. His pockets are the deepest, and those impudent yokels need some dressing down.

History usually works linearly. But not always. Some events — there are many in history — change the world overnight. For example, nobody expected that the murder of a hugely unpopular archduke in a remote backwater of the empire would trigger a war. Much less a world war. Franz Ferdinand was far from popular in the royal family and the nobility. Barely anyone showed up at his funeral.

Notice I didn’t utter a word about the eunuch they hired. Yes, he really is a eunuch. He celebrated a full year of being castrated. All he did was enrage customers who have no truck with his antics. He’s just a sad badly-performing clown, pretending to be a woman. Is blackface offensive? This is woman-face, every bit as offensive. The idea that women would be attracted to drink something they normally wouldn’t consider because of a badly-performing eunuch is too insane for words. Of course women do drink lite beers, but they aren’t going to drink more or switch over because of a highly offensive badly-performing castrato who openly mocks them.

Most revolutions are ready to explode for a long time, but need a trigger event. This might very well be such an event. I certainly hope so.

— H. Numan

21 thoughts on “Go Woke? Go Broke!

    • Very nice, but I rate Hoegarden higher. As H. Numan says, the Belgians brew fine beers, though we Brits have some good ones. Trouble (?) is, you have to drink them in a pub- the bottled versions aren’t as good- and stick with the hand- pumped (not pressurised) ones.

  1. That Harvard frat girl and the rest of the affirmative action hires are draining the coffers of industry, and the cold hard bottom line is that business is in the business of making money, and when woke stupidity is starting to cost them the bottom line, things will change and they will change the hard way. I know of more than a few medium size companies that do not follow EEOC rules in the slightest and they are booming, because they hire the top 2%. Now if you look at govt and various companies who bow to every woke insanity, they are losing money and govt agencies up and down the line are bureaucratic nightmares where no one sticks their neck out so it never innovates or improves. Let the revolution begin.

  2. It is not marketing: it is revolutionary propaganda.

    All the publicity this alleged product-marketing failure brought about may have been worth it — for the commie propaganda that must have been the goal in the first place.

    Someone may have refinanced the loss the “woke” campaign caused for the brand … someone like George Soros — just guessing.

    It is not the first product “they” perform such a stunt with: Coca Cola made a similar campaign with gay actors in Eastern Europe some years ago. And there were others.

    People think that the producers of consumer products use ad campaigns to propagate an ideology — but I think it is the other way around: The (oligarchs behind) the companies spend some of the market value of a brand in order to spread the tenets of neo-communism.

    And after a temporary drop in sales the brand itself usually recovers as well.

    So, here we are contributing to the success of both the product and the propaganda with our own resources and willing participation.

    In the long run the negative publicity is as good as the positive one — including the “grassroots boycott” that functions as a promotion campaign. The reason is that the subliminal mind cannot really distinguish the polarity of memories, only their intensity. Hate or love has the same impact on the mind regarding memory.

    (Experiment: please try to forget a red elephant that’s drinking beer, for ten seconds — I’ll buy you a beer if you can do that. Start now.).

    Therefore if a particular brand survives the “trans” scandal, it will thrive later on. And the propaganda campaign will leave a strong imprint in the mind of the receiver: ideological indoctrination has taken place, either you want it or not. Mission accomplished. Your only escape route would be if you did not care at all and remain neutral — then the imprint in your mind would be minimal.

    But “they” do not let you off the hook that easy: deliberate provocation will anger you and that ensures that the effect on your mind will be strong. It is about your reaction. Notice that the target group of (beer-drinker) men have been hit by a message that provokes the natural barrier of male sexuality that seals heterosexuality from homosexuality.

    That barrier is created in the psyche in a young age when boys start identifying with their father and feel affection towards their mother (“I will marry you mom when I grow up and I will be as smart and strong as daddy”). Till that, boys are naturally bisexual.

    When you as an adult consumer get bombarded with a message that tells you that at the end of the day you could be that gay guy or “trans” guy because he drinks YOUR beer, it is an attack on your early heterosexual maturity process, that starts scratching that “barrier” / “wall” in your brain. That will frustrate healthy straight people because the psy attack causes regression into the malleable state of mind of a boy, essentially mocking you by suggesting that you are a faggot….

    Now the fact that the beer brand in question is a manly thing for “mostly frat boys and blue-collar workers” only makes the clash harder. A more brutal slap on the face — a more successful campaign.

    All in all it’s not product marketing it’s revolution (of the NWO).

    Those globalists are trickier than most people would expect.

    • @ Do not believe them
      .
      Correction: People think that producers run ad campaigns in order to market their products by using an ideology — but I think it is the other way around

    • @ Do not believe them…

      Re: “It is not marketing: it is revolutionary propaganda.”

      Yes, quite, and it is something else: Cultural terrorism

      Communism, in its blood-soaked history, has shown certain patterns of behavior over-and-over again in the various places around the world foolish-enough to try it.

      One of the most-identifiable traits of the “true believers” that they are willing, and indeed eager, to tear down the traditions and norms of the culture in which they reside.

      The old USSR makes a clear case-in-point. Russia before the Marxists was famous for some of the finest and most-beautiful culture and arts in the world. Russia produced some of the finest literature ever written, some of the most-beautiful symphonies and classical music, the Bolshoi Ballet, world-famous architecture, and on and on.

      On the other hand, what did the communists produce? Miles upon miles of drab grey concrete block apartment buildings, which resembled maximum-security high-rise prisons more than the kind of housing any sane person would want to live in. Life under the communists was so dull and drab that suicide rates skyrocketed under the various commissars and strong-man dictators… if not directly, then by drinking themselves into an early grave with vodka.

      Sooner or later, if current trends continue, the communists will do to the entire West – including the U.S. – what they did to the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans and all of the rest. They will drain all of the color out of life and drain it of all of the things that make it worthwhile and joyful. The Reds, you see, are as a whole, a miserable lot… and misery loves company.

      • @ Georgiaboy

        Yes, cultural terrorism is a good term for it. I will use that.

    • Re: “All in all it’s not product marketing it’s revolution (of the NWO).
      Those globalists are trickier than most people would expect.”

      The endgame of all of the emphasis on abnormal sexuality and what in saner times would be called perversions, must be to attack, weaken and perhaps even disable or destroy the drive of the normal heterosexual human being to fall in love, marry and start a family, as humans have done before them for eons.

      The globalist oligarchs, as we now know, are committed to population reduction on a drastic scale. The now-conveniently destroyed “Georgia Guidestones,” which are/were a statement of intent by their movement, called for a “sustainable” population worldwide of 500 million people. Since there are now roughly eight billion people on the planet, that means they want a 15/16ths reduction in population, or 93-94% of the current population.

      The globalists are attacking the problem at both ends, the supply side and the demand side. Deadly “vaccines” which were actually lethal gene therapies have killed or seriously disabled millions, and the world isn’t out of the proverbial woods yet. That and other methods – World War Three anyone? – are reducing numbers of the people already here.

      The attack upon normal human sexuality, reproduction and the traditional family are part of the effort to weaken – and it is hoped, destroy – the urge everyday men and women feel to fall in love, marry and start families.

      Transsexualism is just the latest manifestation of this massive gas-lighting and psychological warfare campaign. It is quite obviously much more difficult for a person who has undergone a sex change operation to consider having children, since their genitalia have been mutilated, their delicately balanced hormonal systems disrupted and damaged by the hormone “therapy” which accompanies these procedures, and so on.

      Not to mention the psychological and emotional trauma which often manifests in these individuals once they discover “crossing over” isn’t everything they were promised it would be. Indeed, many of these heretofore piteous individuals become pathologically-furious at the world, and regrettably, sometimes act out in a violent manner against society at large. A weapon-in-everything-but-name, created in large part by cynical and deeply evil people who will stop at nothing to attain their dystopian goals.

    • I believe there was a connection way back; after the fall of Communism, Czech Budweiser (“Budvar”) nearly lost the rights to the name to the US company.

  3. An Australian friend of mine always said that drinking Budweiser is like having sex in a canoe.
    “F**king close to water”

    I have to agree, even the Maltbeer in Germany, that was predominately for the childrens market, although sweet, has more kick than Budweiser.
    I grew up on that dark Maltbeer.
    Let’s face it, which selfrespecting German boy wouldn’t want to sit at the Lunch or Dinner-table with a glass of water instead of a glass of beer? Especially when the adults have their lovely foam topped glasses or steins next to them?
    It made you feel included as a child.
    Also since German Beer, even Maltbeer, was brewed after the Reinheitsgebot from 1516, in which you can only use Water, Yeast and Malted Barley.
    Not that you could actually get drunk from Maltbeer, you could try, but you’d die before that from all the sugar.

  4. An interesting discussion. I remember the UK based Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) once described European brewed lagers as Eurofizz, which I think was a little unfair, particularly on Belgian brands . However, large numbers of their membership described US brewed concoctions as (name your brand) going down tastes like Watneys Red coming up – Watneys Red was popular in the UK during the 60s but you can’t get it now.

    Nowadays I drink Thai brewed Chang Lager when I can’t get Beer Lao but my favourite is the Chinese Tsing Tao, which I encourage everyone to consume to excess.

    • Tsing Tao is pretty good beer.

      I also enjoy Sapporo which has become extremely difficult to find in my neck of the woods. As well as Taj Mahal, which I have only ever seen in the local Indian restaurant.

      Even before the current bout of wokeism, I wouldn’t drink Bud or Bud Light even if it was for free. I think Kid Rock found the best possible use for a case of the stuff.

    • Isnt Tsing Tao beer brewed in the former german colony of Tsing Tao? Then it is german beer.

  5. I am sad to say that when my Muenchner daughter visits me here in California, she drinks Bud Light.

  6. On a “lighter” note; Many years ago a friend who worked at National Bo’s brewery in Baltimore told me how the then new light beer was made. There were two can lines. One had the cans filled with regular beer. The other had its cans half filled with beer and was then topped off with carbonated water. His remark on that was “Whoever thought that up must be getting really rich.
    If you are caught watering down people’s booze they will tear you apart. Somehow they figured out how to water down the beer and get people to buy it for more money than the real stuff costs.”

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