Saturday, July 08, 2023

SORRY, RIGHTIES, YOU CAN'T TURN EVERY "WOKE" PRODUCT INTO BUD LIGHT

I'll admit that I underestimated the right's ability to do serious damage to Bud Light after the company expanded its marketing to include an endorsement from trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. But now the right believes it can turn any product into Bud Light.

After just a couple of days, right-wingers are already declaring victory in a war against Ben & Jerry's. Here's the story, from the New York Post:
Ben & Jerry’s parent company has lost nearly $2 billion in market cap amid calls to boycott the Vermont-based ice cream maker over a July 4 tweet condemning the US for existing on “stolen Indigenous land.”

Shares of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch multinational firm, slid 0.8% Thursday after closing down 0.5% the previous day....

The company’s stock price has closed Thursday at $51.31, nearly $1 below its closing price of $52.28 during Monday’s shortened trading — and the day before Ben & Jerry’s posted its unpatriotic tweet.

The result has seen its market cap drop to $128.5 billion from $130.2 billion on Monday.
So you're saying the stock dropped 1.3% in two days -- as stocks often do? And you're taking all the credit for that? You're sure the drop is entirely unrelated to the same market forces that caused the stock to drop 10%, from $55.56 on May 5 to 49.97 on May 30, well before the message from Ben & Jerry's that got the right all worked up?

And this $2 billion loss is for a company with a market cap of $128.75 billion. So it's not a huge hit. Ben & Jerry's (2022 revenue: $910.68 million) is only a small part of Unilever (2022 revenue: $63.293 billion).

Here's why a Ben & Jerry's boycott won't have the same impact as a boycott of Bud Light: The core market for Bud Light is blue-collar men. That's not true for Ben & Jerry's. What got right-wingers upset about Bud Light was a marketing effort that touched on gender and masculinity. Of course it drove right-wing blue-collar men absolutely berserk. They may care about defending white people's treatment of indigenous Americans, but not the way they care about defending star-spangled American heterosexual manhood and its sacred link to lousy domestic beer.

I might be wrong again. But I'm guessing that the truly successful wingnut boycotts will all be based on gender panic.

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