>> GEORGIA COLLEGE
Attention is starting to go flat over Bud Light’s marketing blunder that cost it the title as “America’s best-selling beer.” But for the professor who became a national expert on the beer controversy, media attention is still hopping.
Dr. Joanna Schwartz, professor of marketing at Georgia College & State University (GCSU), was contacted by Reuters at the start of the Anheuser-Busch boycott in April. Some customers objected to Bud Light’s sponsorship of transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney.
Since then, Schwartz has conducted dozens of media interviews with outlets like the Associated Press (AP), Bloomberg, NPR Marketplace, Vox, and Newsweek. This resulted in thousands of media placements online and in newspapers.
Journalists come to Schwartz because she was the first professor to teach a college course in LGBTQ+ marketing, which remains the only marketing course of its kind nationwide.
“It’s not like any course, anywhere,” Schwartz said. “Understanding people and what motivates them is exceptionally important in marketing. So, wouldn’t it be great if we had more business classes that created connections to different groups of people?”
Once AP earmarked Schwartz as an LGBTQ+ Marketing expert, her media requests “just blew up.”
In addition to media recognition, Schwartz is celebrated for her work in the classroom. She won the University System of Georgia’s 2023 Felton Jenkins Jr. Teaching Hall of Fame Faculty Award for her devotion to students, selfless commitment, and innovative teaching. She was also a 2021-2022 Georgia Governor’s Teaching Fellow.
Schwartz teaches Sports Marketing and Consumer Behavior at Georgia College but her LGBTQ+ Marketing course remains a unique experience. In it, she focuses on marketing basics, aspects of LGBTQ+ identity, and how identity intersects with other aspects of society.
This semester, students will learn from successes and failures, like the Bud Light debacle, as they see the branding crisis continue to play out in real-time.
“This was a sea-change in the national conversation around LGBTQ+ marketing. It’s become a much more volatile environment,” Schwartz said. “Initially sales didn’t appear to suffer, but the decline was amplified by a series of mistakes in how the company reacted to that crisis.
“When Reuters called, the market impact still looked minor. In the past, if people didn’t want to buy a beer or bottle of vodka with a Pride flag on it, they just walked past it. Now,” she said, “firms are seeing a serious potential backlash if they don’t market very intentionally.”
Alum Craig Conyers, ’20, ’23, took Schwartz’s LGBTQ+ Marketing class and said it made him a better professional. It helped him lead strategy in sales and marketing for a power tool company.
“Lots of marketing campaigns make construction power tools a ‘one of the boys’ culture,” Conyers said. “Since we were targeting the LGBTQ+ demographic, we couldn’t use that jargon and had to be inclusive.”
Schwartz is teaching the LGBTQ+ Marketing class this semester in the J. Whitney Bunting College of Business & Technology from 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays.