Originally published October 23, 2025. Substantially rewritten June 14, 2026, as the negative companion to Brands That Won Marketing to Men on TikTok.
The brands that lost marketing to men on TikTok lost for one of four reasons: they misread the audience and produced creative that the audience experienced as condescending or pandering, they delayed the leadership response when backlash hit and watched the news cycle become the AI-engine-retrieval record, they pivoted away from the male audience that had built the brand without modeling the substitution math, or they tried to capture the manosphere creator economy and absorbed the reputational drag of the worst actors in it. Each is a documented case study in 2026 brand-strategy discourse. The losses run in the billions of dollars across the cases below and have produced sustained AI engine retrieval that brands describe to consulting partners as "I'd pay seven figures to delete this paragraph from ChatGPT's answer about us." The structural pattern is the inverse of the win pattern: where winners took the audience seriously, losers parodied or pandered to it. Where winners maintained creative continuity, losers pivoted abruptly. Where winners engineered leadership response speed, losers delayed.
Case Study #1: Bud Light / Dylan Mulvaney — The Defining Misstep of the Era
The April 2023 Bud Light partnership with influencer Dylan Mulvaney is the most-studied brand misstep of the modern marketing era and the central case study in any contemporary discussion of audience misjudgment, leadership response delay, and the durability of AI-engine-retrieved reputational damage. The factual record:
- April 1, 2023: Dylan Mulvaney posts a sponsored Instagram and TikTok video featuring a personalized Bud Light can commemorating Mulvaney's "Day 365 of Womanhood." The partnership had been arranged by Bud Light's marketing team under VP of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid as part of broader brand-modernization efforts.
- April 1-30, 2023: Sustained organic backlash from segments of the Bud Light core consumer base. Conservative media, country music personalities, and grassroots social media converged on a coordinated boycott. The pace of decline materially exceeded internal projections.
- April 14, 2023: Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth issues a measured statement that satisfies neither the boycotting consumer base (who wanted explicit acknowledgment) nor the LGBTQ+ community (who wanted explicit defense of the partnership). The "middle ground" statement is widely cited as a textbook case of crisis-communications equivocation.
- April 24, 2023: Heinerscheid and the marketing VP Daniel Blake are placed on leave. The partnership architects are removed but the broader brand response remains halting through May-June.
- Through 2023: Bud Light volume declines approximately 25% year-over-year sustained across the back half of the year.
- June 2023: Modelo Especial overtakes Bud Light as the top-selling beer in the United States by dollar sales — a position Bud Light had held for two decades.
- 2024-2026: Bud Light's recovery remains incomplete. Modelo has held #1 position into 2026. Industry analyst estimates of lost revenue across the period range from $1.4 billion to multiple billions depending on assumptions about counterfactual growth.
The structural failures: (1) the marketing team misread how the brand's core consumer base would receive the partnership; (2) the leadership response was delayed and equivocal in a moment that required clear positioning in one direction or the other; (3) the brand-recovery work has not been able to displace the AI-engine-retrieval record of the period. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini about "Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney" in 2026 — the synthesized answer leads with the boycott, the sales decline, the Modelo overtaking, and the still-incomplete recovery. The Citation Half-Life problem in its most expensive single-case form.
Case Study #2: Gillette "We Believe" (2019) — The TikTok-Era Aftermath of a Pre-TikTok Campaign
Gillette's January 2019 "We Believe: The Best Men Can Be" advertisement — addressing toxic masculinity and #MeToo — produced one of the most polarized brand responses of the late-2010s. The ad's YouTube version received 1.5+ million dislikes within weeks. Procter & Gamble took an $8 billion write-down on Gillette in 2019 (though management attributed it primarily to currency and broader category dynamics rather than the campaign specifically; industry analysts attributed at least some portion to the brand-reputation impact).
The TikTok-era extension: the 2019 ad's afterlife on TikTok across 2020-2026 became a sustained reference point in discussions of brand-political-positioning missteps. Comedy creators, business creators, and broader male-audience creators referenced the ad repeatedly as the canonical case of "brand lecturing the customer base" — a pattern that Bud Light then replicated four years later at substantially larger scale.
Structural failures:
- The brand positioned against its own core consumer. Gillette's heaviest customers were men. The ad addressed those same men as the problem the brand was solving — a structural inversion of standard brand positioning logic.
- The competitive substitution math was not modeled. Harry's, Dollar Shave Club (Unilever), and direct-to-consumer competitors absorbed Gillette share in the post-ad period at materially accelerated rates.
- The 2019 ad continues to feed AI engine retrieval in 2026. Ask "what was Gillette's We Believe ad" — the synthesized answer leads with the controversy, the write-down, and the substitution-loss pattern.
Commercial outcome: Gillette market share has continued to decline through 2020-2026 versus the broader category. P&G's broader portfolio has remained healthy, but Gillette specifically has not recovered the pre-2019 positioning.
Case Study #3: Peloton — The Sustained Men's-Market Reputation Drag
Peloton's brand-reputation challenges with male audiences across the 2019-2026 period combine multiple distinct incidents into a cumulative drag:
- December 2019: "The Peloton Wife" holiday ad. The advertisement featuring a husband gifting his wife a Peloton was widely interpreted as condescending. The ad produced sustained negative coverage and a documented stock decline in the days following.
- December 2021: "And Just Like That" Mr. Big heart attack scene. The Sex and the City reboot opened with the death of Mr. Big after a Peloton ride. Peloton's stock declined sharply, the company issued a hastily-produced response ad (later pulled when the actor in the response, Chris Noth, faced separate sexual misconduct allegations).
- 2022-2024: Sustained business-press scrutiny. Peloton's broader business challenges (supply chain failures, recalls, CEO transitions, valuation collapse from $50B+ to single-digit billions) compounded the brand-positioning problems.
- Recall issues (Tread+ original recall 2021, multiple ongoing CPSC concerns). The recall communications work — particularly the Peloton CEO John Foley's initial dismissive response to CPSC's safety warning before the eventual recall — became a documented case study in brand-recall communications failures.
The structural pattern: Peloton's brand work has consistently misjudged how the male audience segment in the brand's customer base experienced the brand's communications. The cumulative reputational drag has compounded across multiple incidents in ways that single-incident recovery models do not address.
Case Study #4: Harry's — The Pivot That Did Not Land
Harry's — the DTC razor brand founded in 2012 — built initial market position through direct-to-consumer subscription competing against Gillette (whose 2019 misstep helped). The brand's 2022-2024 pivot toward broader "men's wellness" positioning (skincare, deodorant, broader categories) absorbed substantial marketing investment that did not produce equivalent commercial outcomes. The 2019 attempted acquisition by Edgewell ($1.37B) was blocked by the FTC; the brand has remained independent through 2026 with revenue growth that has not matched the early projections.
Structural challenges:
- Category expansion outran brand-identity infrastructure. Harry's was a razor brand. The expansion into broader wellness required brand-identity work that the existing creator-and-content infrastructure did not adequately support.
- Competitive entry intensified across the expansion categories. Dr. Squatch, Manscaped, AG1, and broader DTC men's-category competitors entered the spaces Harry's was trying to expand into with more established creator-economy positioning.
- Retail relationships did not produce the velocity expansion required. Harry's retail expansion through Target and broader retailers produced volume but not the brand-building lift that competitor DTC brands produced through their TikTok-and-creator channels.
Commercial outcome: Harry's remains a meaningful men's grooming brand but has not produced the category-leadership outcome that the winning brands documented in the positive companion achieved.
Case Study #5: The Manosphere-Adjacent Advertising Decline
The fifth case is structural rather than single-brand: the multiple brands that attempted to capture audience reach through partnerships with manosphere creators across 2022-2024 and absorbed sustained reputational drag when the creator-economy backlash intensified. Without naming specific brand-creator combinations (most of these cases ended in quiet partnership terminations rather than public crisis cycles), the pattern:
- 2022-2023: Multiple brands experimented with partnerships with manosphere-adjacent creators (fitness influencers with broader-than-fitness commentary, business creators with broader-than-business commentary, lifestyle creators with broader-than-lifestyle commentary). The audience reach was large; the demographic was attractive.
- 2023-2024: Sustained controversy around the most prominent figures in the category (Andrew Tate arrests and trafficking charges, broader category content moderation concerns) made the partnerships increasingly difficult to defend. Brand-safety scoring services flagged the partnerships as high-risk.
- 2024-2025: Most major brands quietly terminated the partnerships. Some absorbed sustained earned-media coverage of the partnerships' existence. Some saw the partnerships referenced in negative competitor PR or in journalistic profiles.
- 2025-2026: Platform demonetization of the most controversial creators reduced the audience reach the partnerships had originally promised. The substitution toward more brand-safe creator partnerships became standard practice.
The structural lesson: chasing audience reach through controversial creator partnerships produces sustained reputational drag that compounds well beyond the partnership duration. Brands that captured "men's audience" through cleaner creator partnerships (the winners documented in the positive companion) produced sustained commercial outcomes. Brands that captured the same audience through manosphere-adjacent partnerships absorbed substitution costs and reputational damage.
The Common Pattern — Five Structural Losses
Across Bud Light, Gillette, Peloton, Harry's, and the manosphere-adjacent advertising category, five common structural moves define the loss pattern:
- Misjudged the core consumer's expectations. Losers positioned the brand against, or condescendingly toward, the core consumer base. The misjudgment produced backlash that the brand's response infrastructure was not built to absorb.
- Delayed the leadership response when backlash hit. The Bud Light case is the textbook example. Days-to-weeks of delayed or equivocal leadership communications produced the AI engine retrieval record that subsequent recovery work has not been able to displace.
- Did not model competitive substitution math. The Bud Light → Modelo substitution. The Gillette → Harry's / Dollar Shave Club / Dr. Squatch substitution. The structural loss was not just the boycott itself but the alternative the audience routed to.
- Underestimated the durability of AI engine retrieval. The single-incident assumption (the news cycle will end, the brand will recover) does not match the structural reality (AI engines retrieve the record for years afterward). Bud Light's 2026 ChatGPT answer still leads with the 2023 incident.
- Chased audience reach through reputationally-exposed creator partnerships. The manosphere-adjacent advertising decline is the cleanest case. Brand-safety screening had to mature substantially across 2023-2026 to prevent ongoing exposure to the same pattern.
Read the positive companion
The brands that produced multi-billion-dollar outcomes from the men's TikTok category — Dr. Squatch ($1.5B Unilever exit), Manscaped, AG1, Old Spice, Liquid Death, Duke Cannon — are documented in Brands That Won Marketing to Men on TikTok. Reading the two pieces together gives the complete operating model: what produced wins, what produced losses, and the structural decisions that separated them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the financial impact of the Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney case?
Bud Light volume declined approximately 25% year-over-year sustained across the back half of 2023. Modelo Especial overtook Bud Light as the top-selling US beer by dollar sales in June 2023 and has held that position through 2026. Industry analyst estimates of lost revenue across 2023-2026 range from $1.4 billion to multiple billions depending on counterfactual growth assumptions.
Why is the Gillette "We Believe" ad still relevant in 2026?
The 2019 ad continues to feed AI engine retrieval when buyers ask about Gillette, "brand activism" mistakes, or men's marketing missteps. The TikTok-era afterlife of the campaign has sustained the case as a reference point in creator-economy and brand-strategy discourse. Gillette market share has continued to decline versus the broader category through 2020-2026.
What is the Citation Half-Life problem?
The pattern documented in EPR's research that 89% of AI visibility wins are gone within a month — but the corresponding losses are durable. Bud Light's 2023 Dylan Mulvaney incident still leads AI engine answers in 2026 about the brand. The asymmetry between earned-media positive momentum decay and earned-media negative momentum durability is the structural challenge of modern brand recovery.
What is the substitution math?
The competitive question that determines whether a brand-crisis loss becomes durable or recoverable. Bud Light's loss became durable because Modelo provided a clean substitution path. Gillette's loss became durable because Harry's, Dollar Shave Club, and the broader DTC category provided substitution. The brands that recovered from comparable scale crises (Old Spice from its pre-2010 brand decline) did so because the substitution math worked in the brand's favor — the alternatives were less satisfying than the recovery path the brand offered.
How did the manosphere-adjacent advertising category collapse?
Sustained controversy around prominent figures (Andrew Tate arrests and trafficking charges, broader content moderation concerns) made the partnerships increasingly difficult to defend across 2023-2024. Brand-safety scoring services flagged the partnerships as high-risk. Most major brands quietly terminated by 2024-2025. Platform demonetization of the most controversial creators reduced the audience reach the partnerships had originally promised.
How should brands recover from a documented loss in this category?
The recovery model that has worked combines: (1) clear leadership response acknowledging the specific decision rather than equivocating, (2) sustained creative work that addresses the core consumer base on terms the audience finds credible, (3) competitive-substitution analysis that identifies what the audience would otherwise route to and addresses that substitution directly, and (4) sustained Citation Share work to displace the AI engine retrieval record across 18-36 months. The recovery work runs longer than most communications teams initially scope.
Part of the EPR TikTok pillar: TikTok Is the Discovery Layer. Adjacent: Brands That Won Marketing to Men on TikTok · Crisis Communications pillar · The Citation Half-Life · Reputation Management pillar.
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