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By Aleks Phillips
U.S. News Reporter
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In recent weeks, several brands in the U.S. have faced calls for boycotts of their products for promoting campaigns supportive of the LGBTQ+ community in the face of widespread political and social division about inclusion.
Earlier this week, Bud Light faced social media outrage after partnering with transgender influencer and activist Dylan Mulvaney. At a rally in Iowa, supporters of Kari Lake, the Trump-backed GOP candidate for Arizona Governor in 2022, refused to drink the beer brand at an open bar.
The row over transgender brand ambassadors is symbolic of a wider debate about the inclusion of transgender women in female issues and spaces. Some say transgender women should be treated the same as other women, while others say they are different and that hard-won women's rights must be protected.
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While transgender rights and liberties are a key issue of contention in the culture wars, one brand expert said that the potential boycotts would overall help the brands, rather than hinder them, as the U.S. is a saturated market and many American names are looking elsewhere in the world to expand into.
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Eddie Stableford, a food and drink branding expert, told Newsweek that multinationals were not innovating at present, and so smaller brands were filling this gap in the market while presenting themselves as inclusive.
On Sunday, Mulvaney posted a video to her 1.7 million Instagram followers in which she explained that Bud Light had sent her a personalized can with her face on it to commemorate 365 days of being a girl. Mulvaney's Day 365 Of Girlhood video series has been a viral success and has charted her first year of transitioning.
The reaction was, in some cases, rather extreme. Musician Kid Rock took an assault rifle to several cases of Bud Light in a viral video, while a video of someone pouring a can down the drain of a kitchen sink was viewed over a million times on Twitter.
A spokesperson for Anheuser-Busch told Newsweek on Monday that the company "works with hundreds of influencers across our brands as one of many ways to authentically connect with audiences across various demographics," adding that the commemorative can it had given to Mulvaney "was a gift to celebrate a personal milestone and is not for sale to the general public."
Since then, social media users have taken offense to whiskey maker Jack Daniel's' "small town, big pride" campaign in which it teamed up with drag queens from Ru Paul's Drag Race—despite the campaign being nearly two years old.
Meanwhile, in February, chocolate maker Hershey's also faced a similar response to an advertising campaign, after including a transgender rights activist's face on special chocolate bar wrappers in Canada for International Women's Day. Detractors decried the move as "a slap in the face" for "actual" women while others supported the inclusion, hoping it would inspire young people.
Stableford himself described the boycott calls as "totally unreasonable," adding that "what they're doing isn't appropriate and relevant to people in the 21st century."
Referring to the marketing campaigns, he said: "It's absolutely the right thing to do because we need changes in the world. We can't keep on using the old model; the old model is broken, and we need a new model in all kinds of places."
Stableford noted that boycotting brands had worked in the past—such as the boycott of Nestle in the 1970s over its baby formula milk—and said: "I don't think it's necessarily true that all PR is good PR, but I think when it's on matters of principle, as indeed this is, then yes, certainly in terms of giving them appeal into territories where they're probably looking to expand what they're doing."
Transgender rights and inclusion in the U.S. continue to be deeply polarizing issues. A 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 38 percent of Americans believe society had gone too far in accepting transgender people, while 36 percent said it had not gone far enough.
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But the U.S. is not the only market food and drink brands are looking to gain a share of, and it is a tough one to have a meaningful impact on. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian found that a handful of large firms control around 80 percent of the U.S. grocery market, with as few as four dominating markets for individual foodstuff categories.
"You can't grow in the States because it's just totally saturated, every market's saturated—it's as hyper-competitive as it gets," Stableford said. "But if you can get brands into emerging markets around the world, by taking an approach that's more appropriate by those cultures then yes, why not?"
He added that what could be construed as negative public relations on the one hand could "enhance a positive image about the brand" among other demographics. He suggested the proposed boycotts "bolsters in the main" and would "definitely" be offset by pro-transgender individuals flocking to buy their products.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. exports more agricultural goods than manufactured food products. In 2022, processed food exports totaled $52.6 billion, compared with $124.8 billion in imported products, suggesting that while brands could look to take customers from the import market, there is a lot of room to grow elsewhere.
Stableford also suggested that multinational companies are "doing nothing in terms of innovation" by bringing new products to market, but were rather just "value engineering" to extend profits on the products they already produce—such as in the vegan food industry, which is dominated by smaller companies. According to Straits Research, among the top ten vegan brands, the only well-known multinational was Danone.
He said that smaller brands "are bringing innovation into the category" and "the way they're presenting themselves and the language that they're using" was representative of that inclusive "new world."
While it could be argued that pro-LGBTQ+ campaigns to ultimately promote products may have cynical motivations, Stableford said that as they did not have to do so, "it's interesting that they've chosen to."
"It could be [for] totally altruistic reasons—because they think it's the right thing to do—or there could be an agenda which is to say: 'Let's present ourselves in this way, and it gives us an opportunity to grow our audience on a broader basis,'" he added.
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