As our Caroline Downey reports, Target retail stores suffered a significant drop in third-quarter sales, attributed in large part to consumers rebelling against the retailer for some particularly controversial products, including children’s items from a brand that sells Satanist-inspired products and “tuck-friendly” swimsuits.
The Wall Street Journal summarizes:
Target said shopper backlash over its Pride Month collection, as well as cautious consumers, pushed sales sharply lower in the most recent quarter. The retailer said it expected sales to decline again in the current quarter and lowered its profit goal for the full year. Executives said they would still mark Pride Month next year, but with a more focused assortment of merchandise.
I can remember when, in the context of the Bud Light boycott and its drop in sales, a prominent columnist contended that Anheuser-Busch should “defy the culture wars” and stick with Dylan Mulvaney, because “protests are febrile and storms often pass as rapidly as they have erupted.” Eh, apparently, those allegedly febrile protests aren’t so inconsequential anymore.
It appears we’ve reached some sort of cultural tipping point, at least for certain brands and certain products. It’s not quite “get woke, go broke,” but it’s closer to “get woke, run the risk of the right half of the country noticing, getting irritated, and start buying the products of your competitors.” It’s not going to happen to every brand that adopts some left-of-center political, ideological, or cultural identity. But it’s going to happen to some, and for some unlucky companies, the financial consequences will be dire. Bud Light sales have declined for 17 straight weeks! It’s fair to wonder if, a couple of years from now, Bud Light will still exist, or whether Anheuser-Busch will conclude that the brand’s identity is irrevocably ruined, discontinue it, and unveil some new brand of light beer as a replacement. Keep in mind, Bud Light has been around since 1982! At the beginning of the year, Bud Light was the top-selling beer brand in the United States. And all of that came crashing down in a spectacularly rapid fashion.
Maybe corporate America is going to have to back away from explicit marketing to the LGBTQ+ community or tying itself to particular causes and just, you know, sell stuff to everybody. As I wrote back in May:
Imagine a beer company that just wanted to make good beer and sell it to you. Imagine if that company wanted to sell beer to everyone but didn’t feel that its job was to make you more accepting of transgender individuals, any more than it felt its job was to warn you about the national debt or teach you the value of standardized testing in public schools or warn you about North Korea’s intercontinental-missile program. Imagine a beer company that liked its existing customer base and didn’t feel a need to reeducate those customers and get them to give up their “fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor.”
How many consumers were clamoring for big corporations to lay out explicit statements and policies about the most controversial issues of the day? How many Starbucks customers wanted the corporate headquarters to lay out policies on carrying firearms in outdoor dining spaces?
And isn’t woke marketing proving to be a cheap, easy, and ultimately pointless way for a corporation to metaphorically or arguably literally pay off the cultural left? Doesn’t slapping a rainbow on every existing corporate logo — except for the divisions and branch offices in the Middle East and certain African countries, of course — amount to the least consequential gesture imaginable? Wouldn’t most women have preferred to have more actual women in positions of leadership at State Street Global Advisors rather than the firm’s sponsorship of the “Fearless Girl” statue?
Generally, the woke-ification of corporate America has been the work of a small, but very loud, group of outspoken progressives — sometimes outside the companies, sometimes inside the companies — who were eager to draft these corporations as combatants in the culture wars. The evidence is now clear that this can be a near-death experience for certain companies. Pay close attention, boards of directors. Your advertising, social-media, marketing, and brand-management teams could wreck your company because they see their employer as a political platform and want to lecture your customer base.