Yeah, one of the things that engaging only in airy hypotheticals allows us to do is just not comment on the very important real world fact that what’s going on here is right wingers have made public punishment for acknowledging trans people their number one culture war.
The leaders of this movement have publicly stated, in advance, that they’re going to try to run companies out of business if they try to be trans or queer friendly, and that they are going to try to be as focused as possible in order to make examples out of a few selected enemies. They have also stated quite clearly that the reason they’re fighting this war is so that there won’t be a normalization of trans and queer people.
Then Bud Light sends one, single, non-retail beer can with one trans woman’s face on it, to that woman, who makes a single brief video, and every single one of us knows about it because the right wingers do the public punishment and outrage thing that they said they were going to do. That’s the real world situation: an entirely manufactured controversy purposely chosen to result in people being publicly shamed for thinking trans people are normal.
And we can have a whole discussion about whether corporations should “take sides” as if there isn’t a single extremely bad actor requiring this conversation no matter who their, no pun intended, target might be. They’re out to get anybody who acknowledges trans people in any way. So however stimulating and interesting you think it is to imagine a world in which a company can merely not comment on “contentious issues,” you will have to excuse the rest of us for noticing that your position on this just happens to be the one that the right wing professional cultural warriors are carving out for you explicitly – to wit, that the default position is to just make “normal” ads, and to do anything at all to acknowledge a trans person is the act of war.
That just means it’s the most successful, and that’s largely because it’s the most recent example, and gets an additional push from all the other anti-trans crap that’s been pushed harder and harder the last several years.
Some boycott has to be the most successful, that’s just how things work. This year it was Bud Light’s turn, is all. If it was Coors Light getting hit, you’d be talking about how Coors was “uniquely targeted”, but you’d still be wrong.
Yes. To use the “Pushy Christians” analogy from above, this is the equivalent of someone going into a private church ceremony, and then loudly complaining about “All this Christianity being shoved down my throat!!!”
Yes, and a lot of those activists are on the right. They freaked out when Cheerios showed a biracial family. They freak out when Video games have female protagonists. They freak out when a cartoon M&M isn’t drawn sexy enough. There’s literally no level of inclusion in marketing (or society) that they will accept, other than zero. You could literally draw actors’ names out of a hat to cast your commercial, and if you (entirely randomly) drew a Gay Name, you’d be a target for complaints and boycotts. “Politics” having nothing to do with it.
It doesn’t stop there,
“African-American Mermaid, swapping male leads for female leads, woke messaging in the movies, major characters who are LGBTQ, etc.”
While you may be mathematically correct, in that if you have numbers something has to be the largest, I have not seen any other boycott on the right that was anything like this, so I still take it as a unique boycott.
Bud Light and Target are the ones they chose. It’s not some spontaneous uprising. There are people spending all day drumming up outrage at Bud Light and Target.
But that’s why I don’t see this as all that much of an “airy hypothetical”: given the real-world situation, where, as you say, the public punishment and outrage thing is what “they said they were going to do” — then, if we’re talking about real people who accept a job that involves making marketing decisions given this real-world situation, then what decisions are they to make?
Yes, like you said, let’s figure an entirely manufactured controversy ensues if X is done. If it’s someone’s job to decide if X is to be done, then — what?
And that’s my original point. The bigots have made it so that you have to consider this, if you’re in marketing. Every brand out there is making a cost-benefit calculation over including representations from minority groups. And when push comes to shove, white heterosexuals still outnumber any one minority group, and probably has more money than them, as well. That’s what I meant by “weaponizing capitalism”. Very few companies will willingly take a hit to their bottom line, and so they “quiet quit” supporting inclusiveness.
If the marketing executive is hired to increase profits, and is deciding between a course of action that will increase profits and a course of action that will decrease profits — or, if you prefer, one they reasonably believe will increase profits, and one they reasonably believe will decrease profits — are they, in light of the real-world situation you just mentioned, to choose the former or the latter?
This all goes back to the conservative position that the Christian white male is the real American. Any deviation away from that must have an anti Christian white male agenda behind it and therefore should be strongly discouraged.
The end goal is a reclaim ultimate superiority in American culture.
Yes, I understand the thing you’re talking about. I’m not having difficulty understanding the idea that a boycott reduces corporate profits. If the right wing culture warrior psychos are allowed to merely win, Bud Light won’t lose so much money.
The thing that is being missed here is that I don’t care about that question. It’s not important. Bud Light marketing executives are not the important thing here.
It’s not just the marketing folks. Target pulled back over concerns about employee safety, at least publicly. I’m sure they’re not going to announce at CPAC that people should beat up Target employees, but they’re also throwing enough red meat out there that everyone has to react.
Yes, it’s absolutely a multi-front war. The bigots have learned that throwing tantrums, both online and in real life, works, because no one wants to risk their profits.
The reason some things get ‘targeted’ and others don’t is purely because of virality. Activists on both sides are constantly throwing stuff out into the public, hoping to get a major response. The things that go viral are the ones that touch a nerve somewhere. Then you get a freakout. Happens on the left and right, all the time.
What can you learn from that? Well, it’s useful to look at why some things go viral and some don’t. And I’m not sure we have the best handle on that.
One can of beer, one can, made up for Dylan Mulvaney, and used by him in a TikTok short video, cost the Bud Lite brand aprox. 25 billion dollars, so far.
One can, not even used in any sort of promotional ad.
I put it to you again that the hundreds of millions of dollars of political money being channeled to lunatics like the Daily Wire and Moms for Liberty who are churning out insane content 24/7 to prey on bigots is a rather easily grasped handle, especially when they tell you beforehand what they’re going to do.
Who wanted to make a point and send a message? Not Budweiser. Billions and billions of dollars lost is not an effective plan for promoting your product sales.
