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Culture war refresh. Many people are familiar with the Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney controversy. About a week afterwards people on this website noted there wasn’t a large impact on the stock price of InBev, Bud’s parent company,
Well, InBev is now down about 10% from when the whole Bud Light - Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship. Bud light revenue is still down materially. At the same time, other major alcohol companies appear flat or up materially. Therefore, it seems the boycott has had real negative impact on InBev.
Does this mark the start of the right finding it’s muscle or is this a dead cat bounce?
The boycott worked this time because Bud Light is completely interchangeable with other products and they attacked their core audience. For the same reasons, the Gillette boycott had a real impact.
Other companies, like Disney or Apple, can get away with woke signalling because their business has a moat.
What was the Gillette thing about?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Men_Can_Be
Wish I could find the ad itself. Gillette appears to have scrubbed it. It was pretty offensive to men, if I remember.
My guess is that that was seen as less important, because the people who use a product are not necessarily the same as the people who buy a product. This is most evident in marketing to children, but even for adults, there are a lot of households where the wife does the grocery shopping. Thus sometimes you get ads for men's products that are targeted at women - the Old Spice commercial is probably the most famous example.
I wouldn't be surprised if Gillette's theory was that it's an ad for women, who buy shaving cream for their husbands or male relatives.
I've long that that they realized they had lost their king of the shaving market position to cheap Chinese razors (like dollar shave club) and their best bet was to lock up a smaller but hopefully loyal core of customers.
Perhaps I'm out of touch on this one, I'm pretty price sensitive on razors, I bought a case of razors from the company that supplied DSC for less than a pack of refills from Gillette cost at the time and I'm still not half through with them a decade later.
The razor wars are so confusing to me because I'm out of touch in the other direction. I'm 0% price sensitive on razors, I bought a pack of Gillette refills like maybe two years ago? I don't get much facial hair, and my hair is very soft and fine, so I can use the same cartridge for months at a time. I find the whole discount-razor universe incredibly confusing, like, who worries that razors are too expensive? I spend like $40 every 3 years.
I assume that for someone with more/thicker/coarser facial hair it's a different animal.
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