What Problem Are They Trying To Solve?

Ever since my colleague Phil began piping up with the question, "What problem are we trying to solve?" in staff meetings at a very stodgy company 30 years ago, this has been one of my favorite analytical tools. I'm sorry to say this never helped Phil's career, though. Indeed, if I were still attending staff meetings, I'd probably have the good sense not to ask it myself. But it's still a useful question. Let's apply it to Dylan Mulvaney, whose latest endorsement is with Nike:

Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney has secured another major partnership deal, days after Bud Light was criticized for partnering with her.

Mulvaney, an actor and comedian who has been documenting her transition across social media, is now a sports bra model for Nike. It comes after Bud Light partnered with Mulvaney for her Day 365 Of Girlhood video series. The beer brand was met with scorn and calls for a boycott from furious social media users.

Actually, there might be some compelling logic behind having Mr Mulvaney advertise bras, since as far as I can figure this out, bras can do some remarkable things, and if the claim is that with our bra, even a skinny guy can have a bustline, this might even be a winning ad, maybe along the line of the old Avis "When you're only No. 2, you try harder,", or Volkswagen's "It makes your house look bigger". Indeed, from what I read, Mr Mulvaney has so far had no surgery below the neck, and that could be a credible pitch.

But that doesn't seem to be the pitch at all. The difficulty is in trying to determine what the pitch is. Has Nike decided the sports bra market is saturated with women, and it's time to start promoting them with men? It's hard to imagine that. You'd have a better time trying to get Keanu Reeves, for instance, to push your sports bra if you seriously wanted men to buy them. But my purpose here is not to try to answer the question of what problem they're trying to solve, it's simply to ask it.

We do have slightly more information to work with in the case of Bud Light. Alissa Heinerscheid made her debut as the first woman brand manager for the product with its 2023 Super Bowl ad.

Bud Light, the popular beer that has for years used silly ads and sometimes frat-boyish humor to stand apart from the (six)pack, is getting ready to grow up.

. . . “We are ushering in a new era for this brand,’ says Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, in a recent interview. She vows to “strip away all the loudness and the distractions.”

. . . the younger consumers Heinerscheid wants to bring to Bud Light are looking for something different from the outreach it makes to them.

“Consumers young and old want a brand to stand for something,” she says, and to hear about “a unique benefit.”

The new Bud Light positioning represents a bid to speak to a broader and younger crowd. “We have to bring in new drinkers. That is the name of the game,” says Heinerscheid, who is also the first female executive to oversee Bud Light’s marketing efforts.

. . . “What has worked for us, it’s about zigging when they are zagging,” weaning the brand off the easy jokes and finding something that is more resonant and meaningful. The new ads “are telling a story you want to watch again and again, and that might be the key to standing out.”

Except that if anything is more the opposite of resonant and meaningful, it's Dylan Mulvaney, a 26-year-old actor whose public persona is a giggly, vapid pre-teen girl. But there's no question that people have been watching his Bud Light ads again and again, though it would seem mostly in horror and disbelief. Standing out indeed. Very few stories have covered the reactions of professional marketers to the Bud Light campaign, but an exception is the UK Daily Mail:

Caitlin Wiggins, Director of Marketing at Liquified Creative, also told DailyMail.com that they would not have advised Bud Light to go with the campaign.

She said: 'They are going to have to say something publicly, obviously you are going to get a mix of negative and positive reactions, it doesn't matter on the stance.

'But a lot of the response has fallen under a demographic of a Kid Rock fan, or a typical Bud Light consumer.

'They have obviously tried to get hold of a different demographic, but their previous campaigns seem to be primarily white males doing silly dumb things - and that worked for their marketing previously.

'As a professional I wouldn't have recommended something that is such a 180 from their typical marketing and demographic.

Well, it would be against the law to market beer either to giggly pre-teen girls, which is Mulvaney's schtick, or indeed to those under 21 at all, which is certainly the market transgender therapists and doctors are trying to reach. But in fact, isn't Mr Mulvaney actually a white male doing silly dumb things? In that light, the Bud Light campaign is nothing new. The Daily Mail story quotes another marketer,

Gareth Boyd, Marketing & PR Director at Forte Analytica, says that while he can understand where the decision came from it is 'not the right way to go about it.'

Speaking to DailyMail.com he said: 'I really cannot understand their approach for this because their core audience just cannot relate.

'Cutting your core audience in the hope you can draw a completely new audience in, who haven't been exposed before, doesn't make sense.

. . . 'People pouring beer down their sink, it says quite a bit about how out of touch they have been with this campaign.

'If we had been working with them then it isn't something that we would ever have recommended.

There seems to be little on the web about the outcome of past disastrous woke ad campaigns like Gillette's 2019 “The Best a Man Can Be”. Forbes observed at the time,

Reaction to "We Believe in the Best in Men" has been overwhelmingly negative, with comments on its own Youtube channel running negative by an astonishing ten to one margin. There are those who really like the ad really like the campaign a lot and argue that it is simply trying to reinforce positive behavior. However, the much larger group who dislikes it includes many men who are saying the ad is insulting to men and full of stereotypes. What is perhaps most dangerous for Gillette, however, is the large number of posters who are threatening to never buy the product again.

I would imagine that Ms Heinerscheid is part of a mahogany row in-group, perhaps full of Harvard grads, that will maintain a tight-lipped silence over the outcome of the Dylan Mulvaney campaign -- but I also suspect the whole idea will be quietly dropped and treated in the future as if it never happened. And I'm still not sure if anyone will ever be able to figure out just what problem they were trying to solve.