Why Some Boycotts Work—And Others Fizzle

It isn’t every day that you see right-wing Americans wildly celebrating the fact that a Mexican brand is now the best-selling beer in the U.S. But that is exactly what we saw this week, after the market-research company NielsenIQ announced that Modelo Especial had dethroned Bud Light at the top of the beer-sales charts. Naturally, MAGA fans had not discovered the virtues of globalization. Instead, they were gleeful at the success of their Bud Light boycott.

That boycott began in early April, in response to the brand’s partnership with the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Conservative influencers ginned up consumer anger among their followers. Celebrities such as Kid Rock and the former NFL player Trae Waynes filmed themselves shooting up stacks of the beer. Not drinking Bud Light became, at least online, a litmus test of commitment to traditional values.

And it worked. Bud Light’s sales plummeted by more than 20 percent by the end of April, and that drop has not reversed. In the week ending June 3, according to NielsenIQ, Bud Light’s revenue was down nearly a quarter year on year, even as competitors such as Coors and Miller Lite had seen theirs increase by double digits.

This isn’t entirely shocking. Although many experts were skeptical when the boycott began that it would have any real effect, the history of consumer boycotts suggests that they can be surprisingly effective. The 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott of the mid-’60s, and Greenpeace’s boycott of Shell in ’95 all worked—wringing major concessions from the company or industry they targeted. And a study by Brayden King, at the Kellogg School of Management, of 133 boycotts from 1990 to 2005 found that a quarter of the boycotted companies actually changed their behavior in response to the protests.

[Adam Serwer: Boycott bans are an assault on free speech]

Looked at another way, of course, King’s study also found that a majority of boycotts did not accomplish their goals. King found, too, that effective boycotts typically succeeded not by driving down sales, but by focusing media attention on offending companies, damaging their public image, and driving down their stock price: In his study, every day of national media coverage of a corporate boycott drove the company’s share price down almost a percentage point. The Bud Light boycott has been unusually effective—not just in getting the company to back away from the Mulvaney promotion, but also in driving down sales and indeed hurting Anheuser-Busch’s stock price.

Why? Social media has obviously played an instrumental role. The traditional problem with consumer boycotts is that, typically, no organization is running the boycott. (It’s no coincidence that the Montgomery, UFW, and Greenpeace boycotts are all exceptions to this rule.) So consumers have to, in effect, organize themselves. That’s a difficult thing to do, but social media makes it easier.

With the Bud Light boycott, right-wing influencers spread the message and reinforced it day after day, and the video clips of people shooting at cans or throwing out cases of Bud Light gave people a sense that this was a collective movement. In that sense, what the boycott most resembled was a viral social-media fad like the Ice Bucket Challenge.

The fact that the boycott’s target was a beer also helped make it more effective. After all, plenty of substitutes for Bud Light exist: The cost to consumers of switching to Coors or Miller Lite or Modelo is low. And beer is, in many respects, a public product: If you’re drinking it at a bar, or a barbecue, people can see you doing it. So if you can impose social sanctions for drinking a particular beer, people will be less likely to keep doing it.

[Read: Light beer: You don’t have to like it, but respect it]

Finally, and important, Bud Light is a quintessential mass-market product. Prior to this incident, most people had no political associations with its brand, and certainly the core Bud Light drinker is not conspicuously or self-evidently a progressive. So when its conservative customers decided they were offended by its partnership with Mulvaney, it couldn’t rely on progressives to bail it out. (The company’s decision to put the marketing executives who organized the campaign on leave also turned progressives against the brand.)

The interesting question is what happens next. Right-wingers, emboldened by their win, are intent on punishing other companies for being “woke.” They’re boycotting Target because of its Pride displays (and the false accusations that it was selling “tuck-friendly” swimsuits for kids). They threatened the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, a paragon of traditional values (which even closes its stores on Sunday), with a boycott after discovering that it had hired a head of diversity, equity, and inclusion back in 2021. They’ve called for a boycott of Cracker Barrel restaurants because the company put out a Facebook post celebrating Pride month. The conservative provocateur Charlie Kirk even said he was going through his refrigerator to figure out whether his ketchup and mustard were woke.

These particular campaigns are not likely to amount to much (and may, in fact, have already faded), in large part because boycotting corporations for having a DEI executive or welcoming gay customers would entail depriving oneself of the goods and services of practically every big company in America. Similarly, campaigns that target companies whose products are hard to replace are more prone to failure. For example, conservatives have been trying to boycott Disney for years, but the campaign has never got much traction, because no obvious substitute exists for Mickey Mouse, the Marvel franchise, Star Wars, or Disney World.

[Read: Who will defend Bud Light?]

Still, downplaying the impact that the Bud Light boycott is likely to have on corporate America would be a mistake. Lots of companies are similar to Anheuser-Busch—producing for the mass market, relying heavily on the brand to drive sales, and facing competitors that make similar products. The record since Donald Trump’s election in 2016 suggests that such companies are vulnerable to potential boycotts—from the left as well as the right—and are almost certainly viewing Bud Light’s troubles as another reason to try to avoid any remotely controversial action.

And that, ultimately, was the point of the beer boycott: not just to get Bud Light to back away from its partnership with Mulvaney, but to deter other companies from adopting any similar association in future. If the goal was to chill corporate speech, right now a lot of corporate executives are shivering.