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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28224 thread views

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.

As others and I keep pointing out. The issue was never Mulvaney per se, it was what came next. If InBev had released some boiler-plate statement about "People being free to be whatever they want because 'Murica" or simply kept their corporate yaps shut, I think the controversy would've blown over in a week and Bud Light would still be comfortably in the top slot instead of having to fight it out with Modelo.

What they did instead was have their head of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, go on national TV to talk about how they didn't want the brand to be associated with frat-boys and truckers anymore. Turns out the frat-boys and truckers were listening.

Personal opinion is I think you are wrong on this. It’s not just frat boys and looking down on your consumers.

It’s promoting something I view as a known evil. I don’t see much of a difference between promoting Mulvaney and well being literally Hitler. I mean Hitler at a minimum wanted more land for Germans to grow their civilization. The Mulvaney message is cut off your dick and commit suicide of your people.

Would a WW2 vet in 1953 look at the Mulvaney message and see one as worse than the other? Convincing your kids to permenently castrate themselves? If you told them a lot of the major corporations were mass marketing castration to society? I don’t think my Catholic faith would see much of a difference.

But I’ve been canceling brands long before Bud.

The way out for Bud is to fire the entire executive staff. Promote that hard in the media . Then run national tv ads denouncing LGBT.

Of course my plan would also get Bud banned from every sporting event because a lot of their tv contracts have people who buy into this stuff.

Bud can’t run ads denouncing LGBT, they’re a publicly traded company vulnerable to activist investing and legally required to prioritize a profit for their stockholders. In practice it only swings one way, but they can be sued by stockholders for picking political controversies over money.

legally required to prioritize a profit for their stockholders.

This is a fairy tale. Corporations don't act like profit matters. If they did, they'd pull an Elon and light a blowtorch to the useless mouths that they employ.

Corporations are run for the benefit of the executives. Sometimes, this might align with shareholder profits. Most often, it aligns with virtue signalling and bloated executive pay packages.

Consider, for example, that a company's stock almost always trades lower when it announces an acquisition. Furthermore, evidence has show that acquisitions tend to reduce the long-term returns of a stock. So why do companies acquire other companies? Not for shareholder profit. Instead, it's for the personal glorification and empire building of executives.

"Maximizing shareholder value" is a lie.

legally required to prioritize a profit for their stockholders.

I don't think this is correct. Forbidden from fraud and malfeasance, yes, but with disclosure they can pursue whatever ends the board approves. Many public companies never turn a profit, plowing everything into corporate growth. Others explicitly pursue goals other than profits, e.g. the whole ESG movement.

When has Disney been sued for the same? And wouldn’t you need to make the argument that the position was against their profits? Seeing their volume has collapsed it’s an argument can.

Admittedly easier to sell to a pe firm first.

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.

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.

While I totally agree that it was the response, I believe the interview where she talked about being “fratty” came before the Dylan thing.

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