Budweiser's Heavily Criticized New Campaign Taps Into Heated Political Climate. And It's Working.

Everybody on the internet seems to have a critical opinion  about AB-InBev, the Brazilian-Belgian beer conglomerate headquartered in New York, whose marketing team launched a packaging campaign in a presidential election year that replaces the Budweiser name on its beer cans with the word America.

Meanwhile, as George M. Cohan could have predicted ("I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right"), people are talking about the brand for the first time in years. Oh, and sales are up. JL

Martha White reports in The New York Times:

The only common reaction seems to be the desire to express opinions — colorfully and with the caps-lock key — on social media. “I don’t think they recognized the possibility for Donald Trump to abscond with their ad campaign,” In the first 48 hours after the announcement of the campaign, Budweiser amassed more than 1 billion impressions on news and social media, on par with a Super Bowl campaign.

IN RECENT years, Budweiser has taken to redesigning its labels for the summer season, evoking Independence Day with images of the Statue of Liberty or the American flag.

This year, it went a little further, replacing the word Budweiser with “America,” swapping out other parts of the text on can and bottle labels with lyrics from “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” and putting the phrase “E Pluribus Unum” in the space that usually reads “King of Beers.”

Budweiser announced the campaign, officially named “America Is in Your Hands,” last week and will use it from May 23 until after November’s presidential election. If the brand was hoping to start a conversation with its plan, it accomplished that and then some.

A gesture that felt patriotic to some felt, in the midst of a polarizing election cycle, like pandering to others. Not a few people noted that Budweiser’s corporate parent is the Belgian-Brazilian beverage conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev. The only common reaction the various parties had seemed to be the desire to express their opinions — colorfully, forcefully and with frequent assistance from the caps-lock key — on social media.

“I really don’t know if they knew what they were getting themselves into,” David R. Just, a professor at Cornell University who studies the intersection of food and marketing, said of Budweiser. “It caught me off guard that something like this could be politicized so easily.”

And that happened even before Donald J. Trump weighed in.

Wednesday morning on Fox News, Mr. Trump was asked, “Do you think you had something to do with Budweiser changing the name of their beer this summer?”

“I think so,” answered Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, whose campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again.” “They’re so impressed with what our country will become that they decided to do this before the fact.”

Anheuser-Busch, for its part, said the creative elements of the “America” campaign, which includes a new TV ad, digital content, billboards and retail marketing collateral, along with the redesigned labeling, had been in development for about the last year.

“I don’t think they recognized the possibility for Donald Trump to abscond with their advertising campaign,” Mr. Just said.

The brand emphasized the patriotic intent of the campaign, saying the messaging aligned with Budweiser’s advertising and sponsorship activities over the summer, including at the Summer Olympics in Brazil and the Copa América Centenario soccer tournament.

“The campaign is resonating with consumers because the timing is right — from the Olympics and Copa América to the U.S. presidential race, celebrations of patriotism will be at an all-time high this summer,” Ricardo Marques, a vice president at Budweiser, said in a statement.

Still, said Marcia Horowitz, a senior executive vice president at the publicity and marketing firm Rubenstein, “putting ‘America’ on your can is not construed by many people as benign patriotism, not in this political season.”

Most brands try very hard to keep their ads politics-free. “When brands try to jump into the middle of social issues, they can easily get into some trouble,” said Timothy Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University.

With the America campaign, Mr. Calkins suggested Budweiser did intend to provoke a conversation, albeit not necessarily about Mr. Trump.

“This is certainly an effort to get people to talk about Budweiser and give people a reason to reach for a Budweiser,” he said, pointing out that the brand’s ads have taken on a sharper edge in the recent past. In Super Bowl commercials for the last two years, for instance, Budweiser has taken jabs at hipsters and craft beer drinkers — a kind of us-versus-them narrative.

“Budweiser said, ‘We’re mad at everybody — we’re mad at craft beers, at imported beer,’ and that’s a little bit in the spirit of Donald Trump,” Mr. Calkins said.

As the debate unfolded on Facebook and Twitter, Budweiser stayed mostly silent at first. But as supporters began chiming in, its social media moderators have been working overtime, posting in response to both supportive and derisive comments pertaining to the beer’s provenance that Budweiser is brewed at a dozen facilities in the United States in spite of its multinational corporate parent, asserting that Budweiser is a quintessentially American beer.

Ted Marzilli, the chief executive of YouGov BrandIndex, which tracks brand perception, said he did not expect the details of Budweiser’s corporate parentage to detract from sales. “I think consumers who are upset about that have probably already stopped drinking Budweiser, if that was the reason,” he said.

In the first 48 hours after the announcement of the campaign (with Mr. Trump’s interview on Fox occurring in the middle of that time frame), Budweiser amassed more than 1 billion impressions on news and social media, on par with a Super Bowl campaign. The brand said most of those were neutral to positive. YouGov BrandIndex data showed that three measurements of consumer sentiment — word of mouth, ad awareness and purchase consideration — all rose for Budweiser between Tuesday and Friday.

Online, the brand has seemed to grow more confident. “America’s greatness has always been achieved by people who give a damn, and we’re proud to release this patriotic cans and bottles that embody that same spirit,” a Budweiser representative said on Facebook in response to a positive comment.

Marketing experts say this strange confluence of leadership and lager may wind up benefiting AB InBev, which this month reported to investors slipping sales of its flagship beer in the United States.

“When everything is said and done, this might work out just fine for Budweiser,” Mr. Calkins said. “Perhaps this is what the brand needs to be relevant in the world today.”

Purchase consideration — whether shoppers 21 and older would consider Budweiser the next time they bought beer — rose to 17 percent from 11 percent after the campaign was announced, according to YouGov BrandIndex data.

Even if it was not Budweiser’s intention, tapping into the polarization rife in American culture today could strengthen the brand’s bond with core customers.

“It alienates a certain group they didn’t think was their audience, anyway,” Mr. Just said, “and they wanted to do that in a way so people who do identify with their brand are really going to see that as a positive.”