Bud Light / Dylan Mulvaney (2023): the influencer-marketing partnership that lost America's best-selling beer its #1 position

Where Bud Light was in early 2023

Bud Light had been America's best-selling beer for more than two decades by early 2023. The brand was a multi-billion-dollar revenue line for Anheuser-Busch InBev and one of the most recognised beer brands globally. AB InBev had been Bud Light's parent since the 2008 acquisition of Anheuser-Busch by InBev for $52 billion. Through the 2010s and into 2020-2022 Bud Light had been declining in absolute volume (consistent with broader US beer-category declines as wine, spirits, and ready-to-drink cocktails took share) but remained the largest US beer brand by share.

In early 2023 Bud Light's marketing team was working to broaden the brand's appeal beyond its traditionally conservative-leaning male customer base. The brand had appointed a new VP of marketing in 2022 with explicit mandate to refresh the Bud Light positioning. The Dylan Mulvaney partnership was part of a broader range of influencer-marketing activities that the brand had been doing with multiple influencers across multiple audience segments. Mulvaney was a TikTok and Instagram content creator with approximately 10 million combined followers; she had been documenting her transition through a popular series called “Days of Girlhood.”

The April 2023 trigger event and immediate backlash

On April 1, 2023 Mulvaney posted a short video on Instagram showing a customised Bud Light can that Bud Light had sent her marking her one-year transition anniversary. The video itself was modest in scope — a sponsored social-media post on a creator's individual feed, not a broader Bud Light campaign. But the timing (the post coincided with conservative-political mobilisation around broader transgender-rights debates) and the visibility (Mulvaney had been a target of conservative-media coverage for months) meant the post became a focal point for backlash.

Conservative commentators (Kid Rock most notably, posting a video of himself shooting cases of Bud Light), conservative political figures, and conservative-leaning social-media accounts amplified the boycott. The boycott narrative spread through right-wing media (Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, Daily Wire, and many smaller outlets) and through social-media-driven conservative networks. Within weeks Bud Light sales were declining sharply at retailers across the US. The decline was most pronounced in rural and conservative-leaning markets where Bud Light's historical customer concentration had been highest.

The sustained sales decline and 2023-2025 trajectory

The sales impact was severe and sustained. In the first three months post-controversy Bud Light sales were approximately 28 percent below the same period in 2022. The month ending July 15, 2023 saw US sales down 26.5 percent year-over-year. In June 2023 Modelo Especial (a Mexican lager owned in the US by Constellation Brands) surpassed Bud Light as the #1-selling beer in the United States — ending Bud Light's more-than-two-decade run as America's best-selling beer. The milestone was both financially significant and culturally significant; it framed the controversy as a strategic loss rather than a temporary blip.

Through 2023-2025 the Bud Light recovery has been limited. AB InBev's US revenue declined meaningfully through 2023 and stabilised at lower levels through 2024-2025. Multiple Bud Light marketing leaders were placed on leave and subsequently departed in the immediate aftermath. AB InBev CEO Michel Doukeris and US leadership emphasised in subsequent communications that the company would not pursue similarly polarising marketing decisions. Modelo Especial has consolidated its #1 US position through 2024-2025. The case continues to be studied as a defining example of how a single marketing decision in a polarised political environment can produce structural brand damage.

How RGM thinks about brand-and-politics risk

When clients ask about marketing risk in polarised political environments, the Bud Light / Dylan Mulvaney case is the defining recent reference. Three structural lessons. First, the trigger event was modest but the backlash was structural. Marketers cannot predict which sponsored-post or modest-campaign decision will become a focal point for sustained political backlash; the political environment determines what gets amplified more than the marketing decision itself. Second, the customer-base concentration matters. Bud Light's historical customer concentration in conservative-leaning markets meant the boycott had structural impact on the customer base; brands with more politically diverse customer bases face less exposure to boycotts from any single political faction. Third, the recovery is structurally difficult. Lost #1 market-share position is hard to recover when a competitor (Modelo Especial) has been promoted into the vacant position with associated marketing investment and distribution expansion. The post-event recovery is not just about regaining the original customers; it requires displacing the competitor that filled the gap.

The pattern is hard to copy or avoid completely in any brand-marketing decision in a polarised political environment. We tell clients in consumer brands to think about the political-risk dimension explicitly when planning marketing decisions, particularly for brands with politically-concentrated customer bases. Less politically-charged influencer choices, careful framing of partnership announcements, and contingency plans for political-backlash scenarios are all part of more careful brand-and-politics risk management.

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