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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Same as the performance-based social media backlash against Nike regarding the Kaepernick ads. Or against Starbucks and Disney. It will pass in a few weeks, as it always does. Social media is the perfect medium for expressing outrage. Conservatives may try to boycott but the hard part is sustaining it.

I haven't bought a P&G product since Gillette scuttled their best a man can get ad. Never really did buy Nike but I stopped watching the NFL and started brewing my own coffee when Starbucks banned guns. Its been good for my savings rate, but I hope there are still some businesses that want conservatives money in the future.

oh yeah I forgot about the Gillette ad. i recall that was a big deal at the time. maybe that proves my point incidentally

I haven’t bought a Nike product since. Maybe I’m too small to matter. It’s very hard to find basketball shoes that are not Nike.

Agree. People are still boycotting Nike. Also, the Bud Light boycott won't pass.

But the situations are different.

Nike escaped unscathed because, for every person boycotting, there is another person who is buying Nike in part because of their woke pivot. For Nike it's not a bad strategy. Before going woke, the political position of Nike was of an evil sweatshop owner. They've switched the narrative and probably gained more consumers than they lost.

But Bud Light is going to lose sales forever. They are alienating their core constituency. And Bud Light will never be consumed by urban elites.

This is awful business strategy and will cost them billions.

I can't not drink more Bud Light, or any AB product than I already don't. If they resurrected Spuds MacKenzie and bud girls, the dog and attractive woman could convince me to buy a case for emergencies.

But Bud Light is going to lose sales forever. They are alienating their core constituency. And Bud Light will never be consumed by urban elites.

They don't care. They'd rather not be affiliated with that constituency. And no one else will pick it up because essentially all the marketing people who would be hired into a big brand are aligned.

Well they should care. As @jeroboam said, they're going to lose a lot of money if they piss off that constituency. The company may be so infested with ideologues that they are willing to lose money for ideology, but eventually that will run them into the ground if they don't get a clue.

The company may be so infested with ideologues that they are willing to lose money for ideology, but eventually that will run them into the ground if they don't get a clue.

Why? If the market is smaller and AB makes less total revenue, AB can just be a little smaller and do fine. Hollywood has been doing fine for decades explicitly avoiding catering to conservatives (since the Rural Purge); the occasional show or movie that does generally does well but they don't follow up.

Well if @jeroboam is right (and I think he probably is), the market for cheap shitty beer is different from Hollywood in that the market is almost all Red Tribe. It's one thing to commit to being woke and lose 25% of your revenue, it's another thing to lose 75%.

Well they should care. As @jeroboam said, they're going to lose a lot of money if they piss off that constituency. The company may be so infested with ideologues that they are willing to lose money for ideology, but eventually that will run them into the ground if they don't get a clue.

I do think "Bud Light" as a brand will suffer. But really, worst case scenario, they'll pull a switcheroo to escape the bad vibes a la Anglo-Iranian Oil -> British Petroleum -> BP. The American public does not have the attention span to keep track of which mask Nyarlathotep is wearing.

Wouldn’t be surprised if the bud light seltzers make up for all the lost sales

Seltzers and coolers and such go through cycles, but they're generally fads and fade. Beer is evergreen. So ABInbev would be foolish to depend on them.

And no one else will pick it up because essentially all the marketing people who would be hired into a big brand are aligned.

Burgers?

I’m not sure they gained more customers than they lost. Though they want the female market which spends way more on clothes so maybe.

The issue is nike has a borderline monopoly in a lot of sports stuff. You go to a shoe store and maybe they have 50 different nike and 4 other brands shoes.

Bud the switching costs is too cheap. It’s watered down beer. Cola is similar to Nike except 95% of the shelf space is a coke/Pepsi duopoly.

Honestly I think about this I wander why Under Armour can’t get their brand going and target hard at the old Michael Jordan demographic of male sports shoppers. I sort of want to start a basketball shoe brand. Can run with slogans like Democrats buy sneakers too. Men compete with men. Then some macho stuff about beating your opponent (old Nike).

The issue is nike has a borderline monopoly in a lot of sports stuff. You go to a shoe store and maybe they have 50 different nike and 4 other brands shoes.

They also have the objectively best running shoes. Among both pros and sub-elite amateurs that care about performance, damned near everyone is wearing either Alphafly or Vaporfly shoes to the start line. Other companies have now copied the "supershoe" approach and there are some competitors that are probably pretty similar, but everyone I know just stuck with the Nikes.

I too doubt any sort of boycott would have any measurable negative impact, much less a meaningful one, to these companies, but I also wonder how well this sort of marketing will work out for Anheuser-Busch. The types of people that I know who would be attracted to a brand by Mulvaney's endorsement are also the types of people who wouldn't be caught dead drinking Bud Light (though something by a brewery owned by Anheuser-Busch is another question), and I can't imagine this allowing them to overcome that distaste. But the people I know are obviously not representative of such a population, so maybe there are a lot of people who would be converted to drinking Bud Light that Anheuser-Busch's marketing identified. The effects of marketing is well known to be illegible even by marketers, so perhaps it's just a more general latching-onto-the-bandwagon thing. Actually, now that I think about it, it could also be an investment in the future: as current preteens and teenagers - a population I believe is more skewed than the rest of the population towards being positively influenced by Mulvaney's endorsement - age up into drinking age, their mental association between Mulvaney and Bud Light, now reinforced for multiple of their most impressionable years - could push them more towards that beer.

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