Marketing the Rainbow: Bud Light and the 4 billion dollar woman

Although Budweiser has a long and continuous history in Marketing the Rainbow, without many protests or boycotts, this recently changed. Fairly. How one simple advertisement stirs up a country, with television and politics getting involved. Marketing dilemmas, splits and half-hearted excuses.

In recent years, the T of LGBT people has received relatively much attention, catching up after years being ignored. That inevitably leads to reactions. Show one scream queen or an ethnic minority in an advertisement and that has the effect that the narrow-minded bigots feel that THEY are being neglected, and that “it seems that everyone is <fill in the blank>”. In the Netherlands this is a bit more nuanced due to our intrinsic diversity (20 parties in parliament), but in the US they don’t hold back. Let’s take a look.

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