Here's What Really Happened to Budweiser's 'America'
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Every summer, Budweiser switches up the label of its flagship beer to reflect patriotic imagery like the Statue of Liberty and the American flag. This year, it upped the ante by rebranding the beer itself, changing the brew's name to "America."
In a tense political climate and an unprecedented presidential election season, Bud-as-America attracted a lot of attention, both positive and negative, on social media, especially when Donald Trump seemed to take credit for the name change in a "Fox and Friends" interview.
From a marketing perspective, the campaign looked headed for a resounding success: YouGov BrandIndex measured consumer word of mouth, ad awareness, and purchase consideration around the time of the campaign's debut and found that all three metrics rose.
But since then, the early fizz has gone flat. In a new poll of 16,000 adults 21 and older, YouGov found that ad awareness peaked on June 1 but had fallen by five percentage points by early July. Purchase consideration — that is, whether someone would consider Budweiser (er, America) the next time they bought beer — peaked at 16% on June 1, which was even higher than around the time of the Super Bowl. Since then, though, it's dropped to 11%, which YouGov noted is the year's low.
"Budweiser has so far been unable to sustain its initial consumer perception bump," the company said in a statement.
Could it be because the parent company, A-B InBev, is actually a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Belgium? Just sayin'.