Like most of Bud Light’s customers, I was perplexed as to why the management of Anheuser-Busch thought it was a good idea to have Dylan Mulvaney, the “365 Days of Girlhood” influencer, endorse its leading brand. Apparently, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, was given a clear mandate to update the “fratty” and “out of touch” humor of the beer company with inclusivity. She certainly achieved her goal. However, no one in management bothered to ask their customers whether they preferred fraternity humor over no humor at all.

When I first came across a video of Dylan, I thought that he was performing some elaborate goof.  It took me a while to realize that he was serious and wanted others to take him as such. In the end, Dylan and Alissa were yanked from the stage as Anheuser-Busch management realized they had made a grave mistake in identifying their brand with the travails of a transvestite. Anheuser-Busch has learned its lesson and probably won’t repeat it. However, there are woke companies that have taken a much longer time to learn from their mistakes. British Petroleum is one of them.

About twenty years ago, the management at BP caught the woke bug and decided to launch a rebranding campaign. It featured the catchy slogan, Beyond Petroleum. The message was clear. The leadership of BP had an undisguised disdain for its product. They instead possessed the romantic notion of leading the company forward to the “Net Zero” uplands. Usually, an attitude like that would be confined to those running the non-profit foundations that oil wealth spawned. However, in BP’s case, those types of folks were in charge, embarking on a plan of wanton destruction of the assets that had propelled British Petroleum into the ranks of the world’s major oil producers.

BP’s major stockholder, the UK government, was on board with this scheme too. A bipartisan consensus had emerged in the UK at the time that the future would be all windmills, EVs, and unicorns, and that burning petrol was a dirty little habit that we would all have to leave behind if we wanted to enter the promised land.

By 2020, BP had decided to double-down on its bet that clean energy would be the wave of the future. It paid $1.1 billion for a 50% stake in the Beacon and Empire wind projects in the waters off New York and Massachusetts. It was the beginning of BP’s foray into the booming wind sector. A boom made possible in part by the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act which flooded the wind and solar industry with trillions of dollars.

However, fast-forwarding to the present, one sees BP management undertaking a complete about-face. They have decided to divest their portfolio of wind energy and focus on fossil fuel production. What an innovative strategy! It only took them over twenty years to figure it out.

Much to the chagrin of climate NGOs and think tanks, BP has made the wise move of giving up on an ill-conceived transition away from its core product, petroleum. Like Anheuser-Busch, British Petroleum is hoping that the world will forget its dalliance with wokeism.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.