'Go woke, go broke’, goes a catchphrase beloved by below-the-line internet commenters when a company adopts a controversially progressive stance. And like so many clichés, its origins have some truth behind them.
When Bud Light partnered a transgender influencer in 2023, it cost its brewer roughly a 28% drop in profits and itself its position as the US’s best-selling beer.
American retail giant Target’s share price took a 10% hit when it launched some controversial Pride-month merchandise in the same year.
Saying you really love a cause when not everybody feels the same way carries corporate risk. And it works both ways: there are protests or boycotts against non-progressive company stances too, of course, whether perceived or otherwise; pushback against corporate ethics that people think are particularly nasty.
Basically, if someone shouts particularly loudly about an issue they say really matters to them, I don’t suppose it should be a surprise when people shout back.
Although it can be: Jaguar said it didn’t mean to send any particular messages, take any stance or alienate anyone with its ‘copy nothing’ advert last year, but that didn’t stop it being perceived that way.
Given that the company doesn’t have any new cars to sell at the moment, it has time to work it out and perhaps, even if it has been wrongly understood, it will inadvertently end up on the right side of things. Because I wonder if the sands are shifting a bit.
Here we must talk about Elon Musk, whose positions as de facto head of the US government’s new Department of Government Efficiency and agitator for right-wing politics and mocker of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on social media bin fire X haven’t been doing his car company any huge favours in recent weeks.
Tesla’s shares are down and, depending on where you look, its sales are too. As the Financial Times titled it last month: “Tesla stock is falling because Elon Musk’s stock is falling.”
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What I think could spell trouble for Musk is that he's now aligned himself so strongly with the MAGA train - that he's managed to piss-off the 'progressives' who liked the EV part of Tesla, and potentially the MAGA fundamentalists, who generally wouldn't be seen dead in a 'soy-boy' EV.
The actual problem is, if you have People like Trump and Musk acting like two guys with superpowers, who, on a whim,ruin economies,cause civil unrest etc, then Tarriffs are just the start, the media and the net actually do harm, the keyboard warriors, the manure stirrers actually post worse, the we're all doomed and so on, Americans sooner or later are going to object to Trumps so-called economic rebuild of the USA because it's going to hurt them just as much as the rest, no man on Earth should have this power to do this.
Therein lies the problem, a constitution that enables a man who has no idea what he's doing, to run the US like a de facto dictator.