The Trolling of Corporate America

The hollowness of some "stakeholder capitalism" rhetoric opens companies to attacks from the right and left. And companies that are truly committed face some tough choices.

- MARIA ASPAN

Pity the Bud Light marketing staffers who hired Dylan Mulvaney. This spring, the brand sent the transgender influencer a can of beer with her face on it for a jokey 60-second Instagram video promoting a March Madness giveaway. Cue the culture-war panic: a strikingly effective right-wing boycott, followed by anger at the brand’s response from the LGBTQ community. Nearly $400 million in sales-and Bud Light's 22-year supremacy as the bestselling U.S. beer-vanished in weeks.

It was one of the more public, and painful, recent implosions of socially conscious branding, but it's far from the only one.

Just in recent months, the Bud Light boycott has shared headlines with similar customer backlash against Target and Kohl's for selling LGBTQ Pride-related merchandise; ongoing skirmishes between Disney and Gov. Ron DeSantis over the company's tortured opposition to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation; and a fast-growing wave of legal challenges to companies and investors over their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

With the 2024 elections just a year away, "it's going to get harder before it gets easier," warns Tom Lyon, an economics professor who runs a sustainability-focused program at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

AB InBev's seemingly innocuous Bud Light marketing ploy ended up breaking the unspoken first commandment of corporate gospel in this awkward, politically divided era: Thou shalt embrace social and environmental causes-especially if doing so helps sell more stuff-but that embrace shalt absolutely not cost the company money.