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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Meanwhile I continue to be bemused by liberals' apparent inability/unwillingness to believe that publicly insulting your core customers might be bad for business.

It's simpler than that. They don't want those people as their customers. In fact, hey don't want them as anyone's customer. They wanted to replace the Bud Light customer base; problem is they drove off of the old customer base before coming up with a way to get a new one.

Well, no, they didn’t expect their red tribe base to know about the mulvaney ad, it just unexpectedly went viral. They were trying to appeal to the underaged drinking market without getting in trouble for it, and it backfired hard.

Obviously they should have thought it through(if there’s one thing you can count on Dylan mulvaney for, it’s to draw more attention than is warranted), but ‘eh, people who already drink us aren’t on TikTok anyway’ is at least some logic.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I think there is a principal-agent problem here where the board and shareholders just want to sell beer and get fat divies every quarter, but the marketing department is probably full of wokes who feel exactly like you say.

It can be even worse than that because companies like BlackRock manage the shares and exercise the voting power even though it's not their money. So you have a situation where government pension funds are managed by BlackRock that then votes for the board that hires employees. The people who have skin in the game are so many levels away from the actual decision making that they have no hope of having their interests represented.

Hanlon's razor begs to differ. It seems much more likely to me that they didn't even realize they were publicly insulting their core customers until it was too late.

Hanlon's razor doesn't apply when you've got the receipts

Those receipts still point to lack of understanding the old customer base rather than deliberately insulting them in my eyes. It seems more likely that she thought everyone, including the old customer base, saw their brand the same way she did--"fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor"--and didn't recognize that the old customer base actually appreciated that kind of humor.