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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I actually think the gender split is how the ideologues convinced the capitalists to buy into the change in direction. If you already dominate 50% of the market with the boys then the best path for growth could be to go after the girls. Obviously the risk with this is you don’t get the girls and alienate the boys. Bud light is the best recent example of this strategy backfiring spectacularly.

Perhaps that strategy was claimed to be what Bud Light was after to placate a few ABInbev dinosaurs. But everything since has confirmed that the real strategy was (and IS) not to widen their customer base but to replace it. Unfortunately their old customer base realized they were obsolete before the new one was ready, but that's often the way things go.

Even though I agree that it was done for ideological reasons, I don’t think there was any intention to “replace” the customer base by the marketing executives, they’re not complete imbeciles in that specific way. They wanted to maintain the ‘legacy’ audience (and I guarantee that word was used) while attracting other people.

They're not imbeciles, but like the Admiral executives in Mad Men, they don't want to sell to those people.

Bud light was trying to sell to the underage drinking market that they already did ok in for it being a declining market, though. Not quite the same thing.

Bud light was trying to expand their market away from just “fratty white guys” to include progressive younger drinkers who might be drinking white claws (or god forbid not drinking at all) instead of mass market beer.

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