Forgetting Your Base
More years ago than I care to admit, I got myself an MBA. The curriculum included marketing courses, which I took an immediate dislike to, but which did nevertheless plant a few ideas in my head.
One bit stood out. The professor for an intro class asserted that you cannot make people buy things against their will. At the time, this sounded like academic theorizing and apologia, but wanting to get my grade and having no interest in marketing beyond that, I just went with it.
Today, after more years of seasoning than I (again) care to admit, plus two decades selling food to the public, plus a whole lot of paying attention, I get the angle of that assertion. No, sellers and marketers do not have the ability to coerce a purchase. However, they find ways to convince people to buy a product they may have little or no actual use for.
People may not realize in the moment that the new-and-improved turnip twaddler isn't all that and a bag of chips, but given time and enough iterations and they'll start to figure it out.
There are marketers out there that understand the peril of time, and will flood a product in the hope of selling a lot of units before people clue in. But, I'm not about fad markets and quick-hit products today. Instead, I'm taking a look at "legacy" companies, those that have been offering products for decades, and how they have forgotten or ignored the bit of B-school wisdom I cited above.
The flip side of "you can't force someone to buy your product" is knowing to whom your product is apt to sell. You won't have much luck marketing three quarter ton pickup trucks to young Manhattanites, and you won't make a lot of money marketing e-scooters to Wyoming ranchers. Ford and Dodge and GM and Toyota will each try and tell us that theirs is the best pickup truck, but the "us" they'll be looking to convince will center on people who buy pickup trucks. Marketers can and do try to expand that core, perhaps by selling the image of the rugged trades or outdoors lifestyle to people who are unlikely to ever load more than a few bag of groceries or a few flats of petunias from Home Depot, but those sales will be bonus, and the smart marketer will not forget who buys the bulk of the company's output.
"Smart" can, unfortunately, sometimes become "too smart," especially when arrogance or hubris gets folded in. This is where we get the core consumers being taken for granted, or worse, being deemed of little concern. Loyalty is expected, but often not reciprocated.
This is how we got the Bud Light debacle, and it's how the mighty Disney has been killing its golden goose: the superhero movie.
Behold, the latest iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): The Marvels, which just belly-flopped its opening weekend. As The Critical Drinker notes, Brie Larson's Captain Marvel was envisioned as the successor to Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, aka (spoiler alert) the character who not only (thanks to Robert Downey, Jr.'s acting chops) built the MCU juggernaut, but presented a compelling character arc in his journey from brash, selfish twat to making the ultimate sacrifice to save billions of other lives. Across nearly three dozen movies and a fistful of TV series, Marvel actualized the comic book fantasies that millions of boys grew up with, making billions of dollars for the company's shareholders in the process.
Marvel's marketers sought to expand that core audience to the fairer sex by adding female heroes into the mix, strengthening their characters and roles, and eventually giving them lead status. All good, and the pinnacle that was Avengers: End Game grossed $2.8 billion globally.
Until, that is, they forgot their core audience. Superhero movies are of interest, first and foremost, to boys and young men, and then to somewhat older men who embrace the nostalgia of their youth. That audience has demonstrably enjoyed female superheroes as well as male, either in ensemble or stand-alone, across the decades. But, Marvel's recent products seem to carry a message "this is not only about girl power, it's “girl power,” full stop."
As in, as one Internet reviewer called it, M-She-U.
As in, a zero-sum attitude where the only way to empower women is to subordinate men.
Here we come to the matter of "you can't force someone to buy your product." Disney ignores the core audience - as in boys who want to imagine themselves as Iron Man or Thor or Captain America - with a presumption that the MCU faithful will keep buying the product as the company shifts its focus to a different and more "of interest" audience. Yes, this is about identity politics and "woke" dogma, the presumption that anything male-oriented is "toxic masculinity," and perhaps even "we can socialize boys to idolize girl-power" tinkering. Sure, if they had made a good movie, I’d be writing a different tale, but what makes the current products bad starts with the baseline of progressive identity politics. Given that requirement, the task of writing something objectively good becomes much harder, and even the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino might have trouble scripting something of quality if so hamstrung.
I use Disney as but one example of a progressive hubris that seems to have infiltrated too many Fortune 500 C-suites. Major auto companies invested big in EV production lines, only to find that customers aren't buying. The actual market for those vehicles turned out to be affluent households looking for second cars, and now that it has saturated, sales are slumping and losses are mounting. DEI and ESG were all the rage, but that alphabet soup is now souring bottom lines as consumers reject its results. And, as I mentioned above, ABInbev took a royal [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] after its Bud Light fiasco.
Other examples include Gillette trying to preach about toxic masculinity to... people who shave their faces, aka men; Nike and the narcissistic Colin Kaepernick; the historical rabbit-holing of Aunt Jemima and the Land O Lakes Native American woman; Coca-Cola taking a political stance on Georgia's voter law revisions (I needn’t mention the WokeDisney-DeSantis feud, need I?); Victoria's Secret abandoning its supermodel "angels" in favor of plus-size women; and Target making a big production of selling LGBT-themed products that include "tuck-friendly" underwear.
While all this can also be viewed through the lens of corporate activism, a matter that warrants its own discussion, it is fundamentally about ignoring or taking for granted the consumer bases that made companies and products successful. CEOs might think the world would be a better place if those bases thought a bit differently, and they might be right. But, just as you can't push a string, you can't simply tell your consumers "this is how you should think." "Go woke go broke" comes to mind here, but even if we set that aside, the arrogant hubris remains. I'm sure that the corporate brass that pushed this stuff holds more than a little resentment for the unwashed masses that won't simply comply with the fruits of their progressive wisdom.
We also behold this in progressive politics, with the abandonment of the Lunchbucket Joe segment of the Democratic Party in favor of progressive college types.
This is all suffused with the notion that the Best-and-Brightest need to spoon-feed and ham-fist us with the right message and the correct way to look at things, while beating our antiquated-and-therefore-wrong attitudes into submission. It’s a noblesse oblige, an attitude that “we know better” (truly, years back I knew a young UK-born Manhattan woman who uttered those very words) and therefore “we must drag everyone else forward.” Need I remind you that Obama famously declared “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”?
Change does happen and societies do evolve. Ours has been making good progress, evolution-wise, across the past 60-plus years, but just as you can’t force a sale, you can’t force an attitude adjustment. Convince, don’t coerce. Explain and invite, don’t exclude or scold or shun. Just as highlighting an Audrey Hepburn-wannabe, fame-thirsty narcissist isn’t the smartest way to engage Joe-Lunchbucket Americans in promoting transgender acceptance, pushing out a woke, Benetton-ad, girl-power superhero flick with an expectation that the Marvel faithful will flock to it is detached from reality. Sure, they might sneak a few such offerings onto an unsuspecting fan base, but eventually people catch on.
The arrogance that produced the various debacles eating away at corporate bottom lines will probably cost a few C-suiters their jobs, but if the echo-chamber arrogance and the “we will tell them what to like” condescension don’t change, the bases won’t come back.
A footnote about “toxic masculinity.” Since everything today gets reduced to binary absolutes, we have been awash in messaging that all masculinity is toxic. This messaging that has prompted all sorts of negative effects, such as men dropping out of the workforce and out of the dating pool, boys being forgotten about in classrooms - when they aren’t being bullied into suppressing their boy-ness, and seemingly every commercial on TV portraying men as wimps, simps, feebs, and soyboys who need their endlessly patient better halves to sort the world for them.
Which made this article quite refreshing.
When I first heard the expression "woke mind virus" I didn't think much of it. Eh, maybe, for some far left loons perhaps. But it has seemingly become a destructive contagion, wrecking every institution it infects. The corporate c-suiters need to get out and observe firsthand the real world - we're actually a discerning bunch who can detect when we're being nudged - and shoved.
The libertarian angle is that markets are very effective when you allow them to work. Even big corporations are held accountable for their arrogance or even simple miscalculation - whether it’s “M-She-U”, Bud Light, new formula Coke or the Edsel.
(If the Edsel had been a government program they’d still be making Edsels. The congressman with the Edsel plant in his district would cut all kinds of deals to keep the assembly line pumping ugly, unwanted cars into government storage lots. A preview of things to come for EVs?)