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The Bud Light boycott continues. Anheuser-Busch is responding by sponsoring vet groups and commissioning ads that "will play heavily on themes such as football and country music". A glance at conservative comment sections reveals a few vocal consumers vowing that no amount of patriotic pandering will change their mind and that they will continue the boycott no matter what.
I am reminded of this apocryphical exchange between two Chinese officers late for battle:
That is to say, a proper incentive structure should not only contain costs for injecting woke politics into business but also rewards for backpedalling.
On the other hand, the undisputed champions of pushing business and people around do not seem too keen on accepting apology. Or do they? The bottom line seems to be: If your public kowtow is more valuable for the propagation of the movement than the display of your head on a spike, you may get another chance (unless and untilyou even slightly step out of line again).
This seems ideal because the incentives for the victim thus contain an effectiveness criterion. Mouthing platitudes is not enough, you need to actually further the cause of your attackers. The uncertainty ups the ante for the victim.
On the other other hand, woke shaming campaigns might not be the ideal blue print for convervatives, given their lack of clout and high-brow media capture.
Nope, if anything, the goal is not to regain Anheuser-Busch as a conservative stronghold. The goal is to inject fear in every other organization, that 1 mistake is all it will take. Anheuser-Busch might be forgiven if they grovel, but not if they apologize.
Conservatives do not want SJW hires to be rendered impotent. They want SJW hires to be screened out at the hiring phase itself. Sadly, given the pool they're hiring from, that seems like a lost cause.
Yeah I think this is the only viable lesson that companies should be learning from this and the Disney vs. Desantis kerfuffle:
Just don't openly take a side in a pure culture/political controversy. Just don't do it. Maintain something as close to neutrality as you can. Hire a Chief Neutrality Officer whose job is to follow execs around and zap them with a cattle prod if they open their mouth to pontificate on any pending legislation, litigation, or controversial event du jour.
Also screen out the motivated activists, as you say.
The company's job is to produce [product]. Keep that central to the mission and avoid making any ad campaigns that are explicitly going to enflame the political sensibilities of your customers. Make [product], sell [product]. End of.
Of course such a person needs to be able to stand up to the lefties who will scream "SILENCE IS COMPLICITY" and the government's subtle nudges to take a stand, so they probably need to have some iron balls to boot.
Well OK, but what if pontificating on the issue du jour helps you sell [product]? Indeed, let us imagine that there is a spectrum of throwing one's lot in either side of the culture war, where at one end there is Black Rifle Coffee or whatever it's called and at the other is the left-wing equivalent. Doesn't it seem unlikely that in most cases the position on the spectrum which well sell the most [product] is exactly in the middle, of all the possible stances? Budweiser have made an error here it seems, but there are plenty of past cases of entering into the culture war delivering higher sales, and given that the business of business is business there is no reason why they shouldn't try to exploit those cases. Hence the CNO will have to stand up not just to committed lefties but also the manager or board member asking why X company managed to boost their profile by taking a stances, and why the company is excluding themselves from such opportunities entirely.
While that is true, there are ways to switch to the progressive support angle. Every company pretty much swathes itself in rainbows for Pride Month, to the extent that LGBT activists are cynical about woke capitalism.
Dumping your core demographic before you have the new client base in place was a bad idea. I saw one Twitter or Instagram or wherever video where a woman was going on about "do the rednecks not know that thousands of dollars of marketing research went into this, do they really think their little tantrum is going to achieve anything, don't they understand that a huge business like this wouldn't do anything without a plan in place?"
Well, looks like none of that was true. I think it was a test run by the marketing VP to try and get limited exposure using a popular influencer to start switching to the younger, liberal audience, and seeing by the results how this would go (would they all indeed go over to the March Madness Bud website and enter?) but it went badly wrong.
And all the "we never partnered with Mulvaney" isn't much cop, seeing as how Mulvaney's Instagram still has the video up with the hashtag #budlightpartner, oh dear:
I think the big mistake was the promotional can with Mulvaney's face on it; sure, it might only be one can (or several, how many they sent out was unclear) that were never going to hit the shelves in stores, but there have been so many promotional cans that did hit the shelves, it's easy to see why people assumed this was the same thing.
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Seems like a high variance strategy, to be honest.
Because it turns out that it isn't easy to predict in advance which side might take offense to a particular stance and how the public opinion on certain issues might shift over the course of a matter of years. It would seemingly take less effort to stay in the middle of the road than to correctly determine which extreme will produce more revenue for you.
And it certainly seems more sensible to build a reputation of "they produce quality [product] and provide good service" than "they have an agreeable stance on [issue] so I don't mind poorer quality or service." Since the former can be kept consistent, the latter maybe not.
But more to the point, I don't see why executives, acting in their capacity as executives, should be expected comment on purely political matters if their company or the broader industry isn't directly implicated or effected by said matters. This seems like a situation where there is ONLY downside to be had.
And I'm focusing my critique here on so-called 'publicly-traded' companies since as the name implies their interests are not bound up in a single person or small group of people who suffer directly for their decision making. There's a near 100% chance that their shareholders come from across the political spectrum and have a huge panoply of personal views that it would be impossible to account for when setting out the company's actual stance on a given issue.
And, likewise, they owe all those shareholders a duty to try to maximize shareholder value, and if they lose revenue through taking a stance on a political issue that they didn't have to comment on at all that seems like a dereliction of that duty.
So it really beggars belief that execs who are nominally accountable to shareholders would:
A) Active risk offending said shareholders' personal beliefs, to the extent those beliefs are irrelevant to the company's business anyway (i.e. an oil company will always offend an environmentalist).
B) Actively risk their company's existing revenue streams for SMALL potential gains in marketshare or popularity. There's just no way that picking a side in a culture war battle is a winning strategy when you're already in a near-dominant position.
I have yet to hear an actual consistent explanation for why giant companies need to set out a legible political stance at all, other than "if we don't then activists might get mad at us."
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That seems to be overstated, a little. They can take a side if the gain in loyalty from the one side is worth the shunning from whatever customers, employees, contractors, etc. are on the other side.
I'm trying to imagine the scenarios where it would be worth, if we assume the company in question is already in a fairly dominant position and thus already has significant loyalty from each side.
Can't think of any U.S. examples of a company which 'boldly' set out a political position on an issue and burned existing relationships only to make it up by forging new ones with their new allies.
Perhaps if there are several, relatively neutral competitors, it could give a reason to choose them?
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And they will need less irony balls if they have a third of the country behind them steadfastly refusing to bow to leftist shunning, government pressure and the compulsion to consume.
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It seems to be working.
Hmm. Just the other day, my manager was complaining (apropos of nothing) about Target hiring a Satanist. I don’t know what Facebook-equivalent told him about it, since the best I can find is that some of their pride collection is a little too goat-friendly. Or maybe it’s just that the designer was tainted?
We’re getting another Satanic Panic, except gayer.
While I agree about the panic, the guy didn't really help himself here.
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I see holiday creep has now reached the secular feast days. It's not June yet, but they already have the Pride stuff up?
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Is this new? I don't think I've been in a Target since Covid. I don't remember Target or Walmart stocking LGBT themed stuff even in places like the greater Seattle area.
I haven't been in a target since the bathroom wars many years ago, but given that it doesn't surprise me. My only regret is that I can't boycott them any further, unless I start boosting stuff.
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