That’s actually the title of a book on my shelf, which was for one of my Marketing courses, 4th year I think.

It tried to focus on New Zealand but of course had many more foreign examples, almost all from America.

In the wake of Disney’s continuous course of failure and the more recent disaster befalling Anheuser Busch as a result of their insane decision to make a transgender man the face of their Bud Light beer campaign I had chuckled at the thought that Marketing Mistakes would be getting some juicy updates in a few years time.

But then I wondered whether such criticism would be allowed, even inside a normally staid environment like business school? I guess it depends on whether Woke will still be a factor in a few years time? The following information information from Buck Throckmorton about the executives at Tranheuser Busch suggests that the future does not bode well:

The actions that destroyed Bud Light were the actual implementation of what is being taught at our most prestigious business schools. The Anheuser Busch executives who destroyed Bud Light and caused immense financial damage to the company are all graduates of elite MBA programs.

Alissa Heinerscheid, the VP of Marketing at Anheuser Busch who hired female impersonator Dylan Mulvaney to be a face of Bud Light, has an MBA from Wharton.

Group Vice President Daniel Blake, who hired Ms. Heinerscheid to overhaul the customer base of Bud Light, has an MBA from the University of Virginia.

CEO Brendan Whitworth, who employed Blake and Heinerscheid to implement his vision for the company, obtained a Harvard MBA in 2008.

In other words, these assholes likely don’t even consider it to have been a marketing mistake, although I don’t see how else it could be portrayed, with billions in lost sales and stock valuation being as obvious as a bomb site. And as I quoted here from Powerline:

“The phenomenon of corporate leaders not caring as much about their customers and shareholders as they care about their standing with fellow CEOs at the literal or figurative country club. All of whom are presumed to be liberals. Not just that, but liberals who follow all the latest fads, like transgenderism”

In that article I wrote about the pressure being applied to all these companies by outside groups like the Human Rights Campaign, with their nasty little Corporate Equality Index (CEI) as the measure of “success”.

But the previous link also suggests something else, something that may not be a fad:

The MBA culture they reflect holds blue collar Americans in contempt. It doesn’t take an Ivy League MBA to mock and sneer at your loyal customers, but it certainly helps.

Overlooked in Ms. Heinerscheid’s famous insult of Bud Light’s customers as being “fratty” and not diverse, is the very explicit statement of hers that she had a “super clear mandate” from above to fix the demographic problem of the nation’s number one beer brand. Anheuser Busch’s executives, with their fancy MBAs, clearly disliked Bud Light’s customers, and told her to fix that problem.

It’s actually that expressed contempt for its “fratboy” customers that really triggered this boycott, rather than having a Trannny be the face of Bud Light. That last is just another symptom of the contempt felt by Alissa Heinerscheid abut her customers when she explained why they chose Mulvaney.

And although she’s now been fired, along with Daniel Blake, (supposedly), Mr Whitworth won’t be resigning any time soon, unless the Board of Directors steps in, and even then they might not unless they’re getting sued by their stockholders. And Whitworth and friends might actually draw a completely different lesson from this episode, as suggested by Mr Throckmorton:

• Bud Light was a brand with a problematic, non-diverse customer base.
• Bud Light’s destiny was decline and obsolescence due to the demographic inevitability of America’s deplorables being replaced by a rainbow of diverse persxns.
• Heinerscheid brilliantly and bravely tried to save the doomed brand, but it was just too late.
• Heinerscheid was victimized by the patriarchy who blamed her for the unsuccessful effort to save their doomed brand.

As for Bud Light, the article lists a few other beer brands that were once very big in the USA but have all but vanished after their sales declined. Schlitz was the one I recall from my Marketing Mistakes edition. Perhaps Whitworth never read it?