Trending For All The Wrong Reasons: Bud Light Edition

I love to write about marketing faux pas, you may have seen a post I wrote a while back detailing some Twitter fails companies have had in the past, you can check that out on Medium. If you have been anywhere near the Internet tonight you'll know Bud Light just had a major mess up. In the age of feminism and "rape culture" they decided a good new slogan for the latest part of their "Up for Whatever" campaign would be "the perfect beer for removing 'No' from your vocabulary for the night". Twitter has blown up with #nomeansno slamming Bud for putting this on their product. 

This is one of those moments where I really question how a team of intelligent adults can get together and no one thought this was a bad idea. If there was a guy who told them not to do this, I hope they are giving him a freaking raise. It's bad enough Bud Light has been in hot water for this campaign before when they stated you should 'pinch people who aren't #upforwhatever" creating a separate onslaught of social media rage!
How do companies go so wrong? How does a team hired specifically to understand social climates and trends decide this is a good slogan?
These questions I will probably never have the answer to. If I was running Bud Light's marketing campaigns I would probably nix the "Up for Whatever" campaign all together and focus on drinking responsibly, it's less exciting but companies forget your marketing campaign should be tailored to what you consumers want from you, not always what you want to give them.

I stand by the statement I made in my aforementioned post  regarding social media or really any marketing fail. This will not kill Bud Light, it will probably still be the go to beer for 20 something parties. At the end of the day a marketing mistake does not change the 2 reasons most consumers buy their product; it's still cheap and it's still beer. Also I don't think anyone is going to stop buying Bud Light over what was obviously an error, I mean what company is going to purposefully put out a statement they think insinuates it's okay to rape someone. Only a group of out of touch idiots would put that slogan anywhere near a companies product! Oh wait.....

Anyways, I may have joined in on the Twitter fun as well!

Well I hope you all had a laugh and a great Tuesday! Here's to hoping my own marketing efforts never end up on one my own fail lists! (This statement is made extremely ironic by the fact that I used the incorrect your above...I should always have my sister-in-law Jillian edit all my tweets before I publish them). #howdoyoumissthatheather

Love you all!