Kid Rock has had enough of piling on to Bud Light when the beleaguered beer brand is already down.
The musician who emptied a magazine of bullets into cases of the low-calorie lager in protest says it’s now time for conservatives to move on, adding he’s happy to down a can if it’s cold and free.
Sales of Bud Light plummeted following a boycott he helped kick-start after the brand partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a bid to broaden its appeal beyond its “fratty” consumers.
The entertainer, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, feels the damage to the brand is no longer proportionate after other rivals like Modelo Especial and Coors Light eclipsed it in stores, restaurants, and bars.
“Do I want to hold their head under water and drown them because they made a mistake? No, I think they got the message,” he said on an episode of The Tucker Carlson Encounter. “At the end of the day I don’t think the punishment that they’ve been getting at this point fits the crime.”
Part of the reason for ending his boycott of Bud Light—apart from being gifted a ton of Bud Light from his friends as a prank—is to prevent further loss of jobs after an Anheuser-Busch supplier closed down two U.S. Bottling plants.
“It’s the working-class people who don’t have any dog in the fight. We don’t want to hurt these people, message sent,” said the musician. “Let’s move on, here’s a bag of ice, put it on that shiner, let’s talk about it.”
Ritchie also told CEO Brendan Whitworth to sack his PR consultants who coached him ahead of a rare interview in which he twice refused to answer a direct question over whether he would have still greenlighted the Mulvaney promotion or whether it was a mistake in retrospect.
“You don’t have to throw anybody under the bus, all you have to do is say, ‘While we want everyone to enjoy our beer, we know who our consumer is and we got that one wrong,’” he said.
Ivy League MBA graduates know little about Middle America
Bud Light would still have to “eat some crow for a while,” in his view, but that would have gone a long way to appease critics furious with the brewer rather than deflecting from a straight question put to him.
Ritchie argued the company made a mistake by moving part of its operations from St. Louis in Missouri to New York City, far away from its roots in America’s heartland. It then exacerbated this decision by hiring Ivy League progressives “who don’t know shit about working-class people or Middle America.”
Alyssa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s first female head of the brand that was behind the Mulvaney promotion, received her undergraduate degree from Harvard before earning an MBA at the prestigious Wharton School of Business.
In April she was put on a leave of absence, and a month later her job went to Todd Allen. According to her LinkedIn profile, she left the company for good in October.
Other marketing execs including Daniel Blake and Benoit Garbe have also lost their jobs over the April promotion that backfired badly.
“They screwed up, they made a mistake, I’m over it,” Ritchie said. “I’m not the type of person to kick a man when he’s down.”
Not all is forgiven, though. The beer he knocked back on camera, Carlson noted, wasn’t a Bud Light.