When Kid Rock decided to take a stand against Bud Light for their partnership with a transgender woman, he chose a strange brand to embrace.
I’ll be honest: I haven’t truly paid a lot of attention to the Bud Light controversy. Frankly, I detest the taste of beer; I have tried Bud Light and numerous other brands. It all tastes the same to me. Likewise, I’m not up to speed on Kid Rock’s music, either. A quick scan of a few of his titles tells me I’m probably better off sticking with my beloved 1970s music.
What does intrigue me, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, is double standards. Kid Rock just committed a pretty funny one in this controversy.
First things first. This particular controversy du jour began when Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser’s parent, decided to partner its Bud Light beer brand with transgender social media star Dylan Mulvaney. (For the record, I’ve never heard of Mulvaney, either.)
The partnership came in a social media campaign designed to promote a March Madness contest.
The New York Post reported that Anheuser-Busch sent Mulvaney, a popular TikTok influencer with over 10 million followers, packs of Bud Light with her face printed on the cans as part of an ad for the contest. It cites a report from a publication called Beer Business Daily, which states that Mulvaney is “particularly popular among Gen Z — a demographic that beer companies are ‘desperate’ to reach.”
Kid Rock starts a boycott
For people in certain parts of the country — particularly the South — that didn’t go over too well. Lots of things don’t go over too well in the South. The South tends to prefer the maintenance of dated stereotypes and tends to scoff at anything that puts the spotlight on people or groups who have been marginalized for any reason. (I’m from the South, so you’ll have to just take my word for that if you haven’t followed American history closely enough to know that for yourself.)
Kid Rock took particular issue with the partnership, calling for a boycott of Bud Light. No one can do anything these days without someone calling for a boycott of something.
We claim to appreciate our capitalist society. We like people to believe that we value the people’s power to choose for themselves. But we also like to push people to follow our lead when it comes to making their own decisions, which means we’re lying when we celebrate the people’s power to choose for themselves.
Kid Rock took it a step further, however. He sparked a legion of fans repeating his claim that Bud Light was the latest company to “go woke,” a term that increasingly means violating long-held prejudicial stereotypes. To make his point (and appeal to his conservative fans), he posted a video of himself shooting cases of Bud Light with what appeared to be a semi-automatic rifle. He had a few choice words for the company as well.
We like our stereotypes and our guns in the South.
Then he committed the faux pas
Over the weekend, Kid Rock appeared at the UFC 287 event in Miami, just days after destroying multiple cases of Bud Light with a machine gun. During that appearance, he apparently chose to pose with a can of Happy Dad Seltzer.
A bit more disclosure: I’m not remotely interested in UFC and I’ve never tried Happy Dad Seltzer, either.
Kid Rock apparently chose Happy Dad as an alternative to promote as a way of encouraging people to switch away from Bud Light.
Unfortunately for Kid Rock, Happy Dad itself worked with a well-known transgender personality. In fact, the seltzer company previously collaborated with reality star Caitlyn Jenner. I would argue that Jenner is far more well-known than Mulvaney.
So how did Kid Rock miss that little piece of history?
Well, that’s the thing about these little pop-up protests. People get so angry that all they care about is having their little public hissy fit. They don’t care to look into the brand they suddenly decide to back. It’s just about badmouthing the brand that suddenly dared to tick them off.
To put it another way, self-righteous protesters never let facts get in the way of a good fury.
These protests mystify me
Anyone who follows Kid Rock’s lead and actually stops buying Bud Light clearly isn’t a fan of it to begin with. Maybe, to them, all beer really does taste the same.
But if you love a brand, you love the brand. One partnership with someone who is transgender and who will continue to be transgender no matter what you think of it shouldn’t be enough for you to abandon a brand you supposedly like.
We still hear calls to boycott Chick-fil-A because its parent company donates to Christian organizations that are against same-sex marriage. I like Chick-fil-A. I eat there once in a while. But I never eat there because of the fact that their parent organization donates to pro-Christian organizations. I’m a Christian who happens to disagree with some points some of those organizations may embrace.
I don’t eat at Chick-fil-A because of who they donate to; I eat there because I like their food.
Instead of Bud Light, my drink of choice is Diet Coke. If I were to look at Diet Coke’s history, I might find something that would raise my eyebrows. Maybe they partnered with some person or group whose beliefs differ from mine in some way.
But I like Diet Coke. So unless Coca-Cola does something extraordinarily egregious, I’m going to still drink Diet Coke. I may well come to this silly little blog and complain about whatever decision bothered me. But if I really like Diet Coke, I’m going to drink Diet Coke.
If some decision Coca-Cola makes (that doesn’t affect the taste or the price of Diet Coke) makes me so angry that I just stop drinking it cold, I was never that much of a fan of the stuff to begin with.
Brand loyalty is brand loyalty. If you’re that susceptible to some call for a boycott, you don’t really know what brand loyalty is.
