What's the deal? Morons sold shares because they don't support trans rights but overall the commercial is a tremendous success because everyone is talking about it and the brand got more audacity with trans women promoting beer.
So, if a company started printing Hitler on their products in order to promote them, would you also start buying their stocks? I mean, surely it would be a "tremendous success" because "everyone is talking about it and the brand got more audacity", right?
Wrong! You should consider that a stock price is not only representing the actual material value of the company but also the goodwill; the value of the brand. If a brand fucks up it's image, it loses brand value. And the value you lose if your core customer base is pissed off at you, is something that can be extremely hard to rebuild. For companies, bad PR exists. The stock would only be worth buying if you believe that the outrage is so short-lived that the Mulvaney marketing stunt has no lasting negative effect. Or that the increase in profit will be so positive, that it outweighs the damage of the troon marketing.
There are countless examples of companies that ruined their brand by misguided marketing campaigns or because of how they handles incidents and it took years upon years for them to get their goodwill back on the level is was prior to those particular incidents.
Take a look at Gillette. Around 2019/2020, Gillette (a brand whose core consumer group consists of mainly men) started to jump on the woke bandwagon and produced their incredibly offensive ad that displayed males as the universal aggressor against women and how niggers need to step up to stop White men from harassing women. It tried to appeal to a , from their commercial point of view, less important demographic by attacking their core consumer base.
What happened to the brand value? It plummeted and continues to do so until today ...
Source
Even mainstream media had to admit, that Gillette dealt sustained damage to their brand image. Forbes, for example, saw it fit to proclaim that "
For Men, Gillette Is No Longer The Best A Brand Can Get".
And the stock price? It dropped together with the brand value. For one, yes, we can clearly see the effect of the corona "pandemic" on the stock... but it should be clear that the suffering brand image did not help the situation. In fact, if Gillette would not have engaged in that kind of advertising, the stock price would be better:
Why I mention Gillette? Because I see it as comparable in terms of how big a blunder the Mulvaney campaign is for Budweiser. Worse for $BUD, it has a worse market position than Gillette had. If you go to a store to buy razors, your choice is more often than not limited to Gillette and maybe one or two other brands. For beer, the alternatives on the market are countless. In other words, Budweiser is more reliant on their brand image than Gillette; therefore, this marketing campaign fail is more likely to hit them even harder.
I would not be too sure that by pandering to troons and the woke crowd, clearly in opposition to their core consumer base, Budweiser will increase their profits over the loss of brand value. So, saying that their stock has become more attractive might not be the correct assessment of the situation.