Target has been celebrating Pride Month annually for more than a decade and this year’s prominent displays have included onesies and rompers for newborn babies along with other apparel for children of all ages.
Female-style swimsuits that can be used to “tuck” male genitalia led to a backlash on social media.
If it makes money then capitalists will do it – if it loses they won’t. Well, after trying it out at least.
Sure, niche brands will often find a market but mass market ones? Gotta go where the balance of the market is. This is actually going to be an interesting test. Bud and Target. Is the balance of that mass market running the rainbow flag way? Or anti- it? Because how that money flows is going to tell us and then change the behaviour of those brands.
Don’t usually shop at Target. I’ll have to wait and see what Woollies do.
The problem is that there’s an awfully big gap between stated and revealed preferences when it comes to the LGBTQetc. And I think some businesses have let in too many lefty liberals into marketing. It’s important to have people who are a lot like your customers.
I think a good way to observe things is through movies. What do people find distasteful, what do they actively go to? The gay romcom Bros, was a flop. Marvel has a few gay characters, but not any main characters that are gay. I think most people are tolerant and accepting of gays, but don’t particularly want to know about them.
If you’re niche, have nothing to lose (like Subaru) then go for it and target lesbians, because no-one else was marketing to lesbians.
…especially when it comes to the point that expressing your opinion as anti-LGBTQ+ or even distaste at certain LGBTQ+ behaviours and practises that can get you fired from your job, ostracised from your community and your life cancelled.
Thus we end up with expressed preferences being silenced or worse still “Forced Speech” like “That Dylan Mulvaney girl sure is brave” (through gritted teeth).
But nobody can force you to buy Bud Light at the pub, bar or supermarket, not when there are lots of other brands of American Pißwasser that you can choose from (some of which aren’t even made by Anheuser-Busch) and if that is the only form of free expression / revealed preference you’re allowed to make, then you’re probably going to get a lot of it.
Hence the recent drop in Anheuser-Busch sales of Bud Light and the increased sales of other brands of American Pißwasser like Moulson, Pabst, etc.
All I can say is that the value of Dylan Mulvaney’s fake “I’m a girl” routine on the anti-woke side of the culture wars is clearly billions of dollars, because he’s provided a means of expressing distaste against the woke forces of LGBT+ that wasn’t there before.
Somehow though, he’s very unhappy about this.
😀
The outdoor clothing brand Northface seem to have fallen into the same trap as A-B, thinking that they can push LGBTQ+ propaganda onto kids without consequence.
I’ve got a feeling they’re about to learn a lesson.
Latest Northface Campaign
“Female-style swimsuits that can be used to “tuck” male genitalia led to a backlash on social media.”
That they did. But removing them resulted in an attempted bombing. Remind me: who are the extremists again?
I’m not sure this is going to completely backfire on the clothing stores/brands.
I have read that around 7% of US people identify as LGBT etc with the figure rising to over 20% in the younger age groups.
This is mainly self-identifying bollox from a generation desperate to appear edgy and relevant. 90% of them would run a mile from a real homosexual encounter let alone seriously consider a surgeons knife. However they will take the easy option en masse and splash out on the gayest clothing available. To this end Target, TNF and all the rest aren’t going to stop pushing it any time soon.
No point going “Wahey! LGBTQ+ Sales are up” if your gross revenue and share price are in the toilet because a relatively small percentage of shoppers decide to boycott your store.
Just as A-B will think twice about pulling another stunt like Mulvaney, I suspect that Target will come out of this rethinking how much taste the general public ACTUALLY has for LGBTQ+ stuff.
All the polls in the world won’t tell you what people really think if their views are deemed “persona non grata”. It’s like the “shy Tory” phenomenon on steroids.
The C-Level executives that come up with this bollocks live in the same woke bubble that has neither experience nor understanding of what the plebs think or why. In fact they’ve clearly expressed that they find the plebs fundamentally objectionable and for some reason think the way to fix this is to rub LGBTQ+ in their faces. You’d have to be an idiot to think you’d get a reaction other than the one that was delivered, but there you go.
The lack of awareness is astonishing.
she told of her strategy to ditch Bud Light’s ‘fratty’ reputation
And not the soft bigotry of “fratty” automatically being assumed to be bad.
It’s part and parcel with authorities keeping gyms closed longer than other businesses during covid, which to me really seemed like it was down to the connection with “gym bros”.
We’re already boycotting wine from France and Germany and butter from Ireland. How many more things must we boycott?
As long as there is competition and (relatively) free markets, then boycotts of products aren’t really much of a hardship for the consumer.
In fact they can serendipitously lead one to better alternatives, such as wines from Chile or Argentina instead of France. Harry’s razors instead of Gillette.
What is insidious though is when one company gobbles up a huge share of the market under the guise of a multitude of different brands. How many people stopped drinking Bud Lite only to purchase one of the multitude of other beers made by AB-InBev without realising?
Further to my comment, I’m pretty sure that AB-InBevs response to what’s happening regarding the Bud Lite controversy is to do nothing and plough on regardless. Hence the non-apology apology by the CEO. They know they have so much of the market (around 1/3rd globally) stitched up that consumers effectively have no voice.
How come no regulators have stepped in to address this issue?
The one time I looked at the recent numbers it doesn;t seem to be substituting to other InBev brands. They’re all losing sales, but Bud Lite first. It’s from other brewers picking up the slack – Coors Lite up 16% or summet from memory.
The non-apology apology by the CEO was itself part of the problem. He doesn’t understand why Bud Light is being targeted for something that he doesn’t see as an issue.
Well another problem of our times is that of Kinsey/Harvard types being parachuted into positions where they know literally nothing of the nuts and bolts of the operation that they are running.
I understand that in running a big multi-national, being well versed in the whole accounting / legal / business side is vital, but I can’t help but think that the total disconnect that most modern CEOs have with their customers/product/shop floor staff is somewhat of a hindrance.
Tim Worstall said:
“it doesn;t seem to be substituting to other InBev brands. They’re all losing sales, but Bud Lite first”
That’s interesting, because it looks like people are actually making the effort to find out which brands are theirs to boycott them. That suggests a real anger.
BlokeInBrum,
I knew someone who’d been a direct report to Lord Weinstein at GEC, not a courtier as he had few of those, but a division manager. He reckoned LW knew his business division better than him and was across all the numbers. According to him you only got to miss your targets once before it as interview without coffee and then gone.
Thinking about it, if my acquaintance isn’t dead he’s well in to his 80s so there should be no problem saying he ran the very successful pay phones division and got out when he saw the the writing on the wall for them.
Yep: