Pity the Bud Light marketing staffers who hired Dylan Mulvaney. This spring, the brand sent the transgender influencer a can of beer with her face on it for a jokey 60-second Instagram video promoting a March Madness giveaway. Cue the culture-war panic: a strikingly effective right-wing boycott, followed by anger at the brand’s response from the LGBTQ community. Nearly $400 million in sales—and Bud Light’s 22-year supremacy as the bestselling U.S. beer—vanished in weeks.
It was one of the more public, and painful, recent implosions of socially conscious branding, but it’s far from the only one.
