As the world becomes increasingly polarised, no one has been happier than the marketing and advertising agencies for large brands. Identifying as Left or Right has become an important part of individual identity in online culture and latching onto these sentiments is now a booming trend where no industry is exempt. Recently those with left-leaning tendencies were effectively told to hand in their membership cards if they didn’t see the Barbie movie, while those on the right couldn’t look their friends in the eye if they hadn’t downloaded Jason Aldean’s “Try that in a small town”.
While just a few years ago people were heaping scorn on Pepsi for their famous advert with Kendall Jenner that trivialised Black Lives Matter, Gillette and Dove soap’s successes at the same time encouraged agencies to push on with the tactic. Among numerous other brands, the left is now encouraged to buy their clothes from Patagonia, who ran subtle attack ads in the last American election against Donald Trump, or find romance on OK Cupid, which calls itself “A home for every tree hugger”. The right can rest easy on MyPillows, or in South Africa, slake their thirst with a can of Boer Brand Cola. A survey from public relations firm Edelman, in 2018, found that nearly two-thirds of consumers around the world will buy or boycott a brand solely because of its position on a social or political issue – up a whopping 7% from the same poll a year before. Everyone is eating it up.
Of course, there have been marketing missteps along the way. Eager to expand their brand into a new market, Bud Lite gave trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney the opportunity to market their product to the left thereby fiercely alienating the hard-core, right-wing republican army who previously had been the only people to drink the stuff.
The question is, why is this all happening? What happened to reasoned thinking? Did you like Bud Lite? Why then stop drinking it simply because an advert suggested people different to you, might want to drink it too? Are you choosing to drink an inferior cola simply cause it speaks to your nationalist tendencies? No one would ever have gone to a movie about an outdated toy phenomenon like Barbie if they hadn’t been told it would make them appear to be better people, so why did they do it?
Some would say that a company’s political stance is important and that by supporting the companies that openly advance the agendas they support, they feel like they are building a better world. In fact, according to a recent survey of 1,500 people released by data firm Sprout Social, Â most people would say that, because seventy percent of consumers now believe it’s important for brands to take a public stand on social and political issues.
To them, I would ask, which do you think the boards of these companies care about more, your political beliefs, or the short-term sales that boost the share price and their fat bonuses?
The Anheuser-Busch, Bud Lite debacle shows you that even if you have been supporting a brand for decades, they will gladly betray their stated beliefs and audience if they believe it will give them additional income and profits. Now that they have lost a significant portion of their market share, Anheuser-Busch is waging a marketing campaign to win them back. The media is full of messages from the children of the company founders telling anyone who will listen that the founders would be, “spinning in their graves” at the inclusion of Mulvaney in their campaigns. Clearly, strongly held political beliefs then.
At the end of the day, these stated political aims are just marketing and puffery. They are only about expanding the market and making sales for companies that exist in fierce competition with everyone else.
Humanity is losing its ability to think and to reason and is being manipulated on a scale that even the jaded admen of Sterling Cooper would have thought impossible. If you liked playing with Barbies as a child, and want to capture some of that nostalgia, go. If you like drinking Bud Lite, drink it. But please, don’t think you are building a better world for anyone other than the CEOs.
