Go Woke, Go Broke Lesson Three: Do Not Hire Out-Of-Touch Ivy Leaguers To Run Bud Light
Corporate America has not completely lost its marbles, but the bag sprang a leak about 10 years ago.
The Bud Light debacle could be another teachable moment for “woke” corporate America — if they listen. Know your customer. And if you do not know your customer, hire someone who does.
The public embarrassment of Bud Light missing the mark on an advertising campaign has cost the company billions in sales and market capitalization. Guess whose brainchild it was to plaster a flamboyant transvestite’s picture on its blue-collar beer brand? An out-of-touch, virtue signaling leftie, Mrs. Alissa Heinerscheid. And … wait for it … wait for it … a Harvard, Groton and Wharton grad. Her personal pronouns are “dumb” and “ass.”
In a video, Mrs. Heinerscheid proclaimed herself a hero by saying that if she did not do anything, there was no future for Bud Light. Really? Bud Light, an iconic Budweiser brand, had no future? As she put it, except for her bravery Bud Light would no longer sell.
So she tried to change this great brand from Bud Light to Bud Light-in-the-Loafers.
In a leftist word salad worthy of a Kamala Harris speech, her stated goal with Bud was “inclusivity and shifting the tone.” No, your job is to sell beer, usually to middle-aged white men who have very real and very hard jobs that provide goods and services to people like you.
Thank goodness Mrs. Heinerscheid is white so Anheuser Busch could fire her. This speaks volumes about the curious, coastal liberal, elite class isolation and echo chamber thinking prevalent in people in her position in corporate America. This is the same thinking that prevails in both the Centers for Disease Control and the ruling political class in Washington, D.C.
The leaders of this generation, especially at the Ivy League, say they want to change the world, but they don’t even know how to change a tire.
Like actors, teachers and politicians, what corporations have come to realize is that the media and the policing authorities of the Democrat Party will leave you alone and let you do just about anything if you repeat their dictates. So, they went with a guy who really knows how to dictate, transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney.
You could argue that Bud Light has always been trans: it is water that identifies itself as a good beer. As a bourbon drinker, I think Bud Light is so weak that I call it the “official beer of child custody hearings.”
The tone-deaf nature of this beer campaign is repeated daily in corporate America by a class of young, left wing-indoctrinated, Ivy League dolts who could not run a hardware store. I worked on Wall Street with these type folks. They are no smarter than any state college graduate. And they are much more dangerous because the arrogance of their Ivy League indoctrination imbues them with the false belief that they are much smarter than they really are. Doing well on the education industry-contrived SAT has become the marker for hiring rather than common sense and an up-through-the-ranks work ethic.
Hubris can remain at Harvard, but please do not try any of your “theories” about what is best for us on us. Keep those contained in your doctoral thesis for peer-reviewed papers.
The Ivy League, and thus corporate America, are in cultural decay. They are managed by scared and “woke” people who are incentivized not by results but by tokenism, in a bureaucratic morass in which incompetence can hide.
I tell this joke when I speak at colleges. Three men are scheduled for electric chair execution on Death Row. One graduated from the University of Tennessee, the second from Alabama and the third from Harvard. The Warden and preacher are there, and all three death row prisoners are watching. The UT guy gets in the chair. They try to execute him; sparks fly and the electric chair fails. The Warden and preacher say, “It is God’s will, he must be innocent,” and they free the man. Then the ‘Bama grad is seated, and the same thing happens. Preacher and Warden say, “It’s God’s will” and free the man. Having witnessed all this, the Harvard guy is last. The same thing happens: sparks fly and the officials say he is free to go. The Harvard grad says, “Wait a minute, if you just take that wire there and reconnect it to …”
EQ trumps IQ – every time.
AUTHOR
RON HART
A libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, Ron is a commentator on radio and TV. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.
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