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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.
Can the reward not simply accrue to those that haven't defected? I suppose tit-for-tat is a stable prisoner's dilemma solution, but if there are always observers that can and will enter the game, permanent punishment against a defector seems like an entirely feasible strategy to get what one wants from the next seller up. AB-InBev simply doesn't offer anything that other drink conglomerates can't, there is no need to reward them for a tepid backpaddle.
But really, this is still overcomplicating it. There's no way for Bud Light to take it back. If you're at a bar and order a Bud Light, some non-trivial percentage of people now think of it as the tranny beer. You're ordering the tranny beer and your friends will snicker at you for it. Apologies aren't going to change that. Nothing you or I say will change that. For the first time in my recollection, the right successfully branded something as super lame for their base and they have reacted accordingly. Much like the woke mobs really do think that so-and-so is a vile racist bigot Nazi and thus there is no way to call them off, rednecks think Bud Light is the tranny beer and Matt Walsh doesn't dictate that ending.
Sure! But is it optimal? One reason the woke movement has such power is that it can make its victims work for them.
I can't actually think of an example of the woke movement successfully defenestrating a company via consumer choice, causing it to knuckle under. I can think of examples of using the legal power of the esoteric interpretations of Civil Rights law that became the norm, and this remains the primary weapon used against "bigoted" companies. I can think of companies that had execs pretty much always wanted to be in cool crowd anyway. I cannot think of an example of a company that was right-aligned, faced people on the political left electing to stop purchasing their product, then changing.
Does this fit? Just over a decade ago Target got on the wrong side of the gay marriage movement. A few years later, they declared themselves as allies.
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