American consumers are waking up and finding that they are strong. Arts-graduate marketing execs in the coastal cities can sneer at Middle American “Deplorables” all they like, but in the end, them as pays the piper calls the tune.
And woke capitalism is blowing a big, flat raspberry on a very sad trombone, right now.
One by one, companies have come under an expanding attack. Anheuser-Busch, Target, Kohl’s and VF Corp.’s North Face brand have all felt the vitriol of this latest push from the right. And the list keeps growing. These companies have been branded as “woke capitalists” — and worse — as critics urged boycotts of these companies’ products. Bud Light came into the crosshairs after it struck a partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, while North Face received backlash for an ad featuring drag queen Pattie Gonia. Target and Kohl’s have been criticized for Pride-themed clothing.
Note the misdirection, here. Target and Kohl’s have been criticised for clothing that promotes transgenderism and Satanism to children. And it’s not just from “the right” — the sheer scale of the economic punishment meted out to these companies shows just how widespread the revulsion at woke capitalism really is.
“The main reason boycotts generally are effective is because they threaten the reputation of the company by putting the company in a negative media spotlight, and companies don’t want to have negative attention of any kind drawn to them,” said Brayden King, a professor of management and organizations, who has studied how boycotts impact company stock prices.
But King admits that the boycotts against woke capitalism appear to be something else. Generally, the stock recovers quickly. But Anheuser-Busch’s stock is falling — and falling, and falling.
“With 7 weeks of data, the consumer backlash at Bud Light seems quite durable,” said Cowen analyst Vivien Azer, in a research note Friday. “This is not a surprise to us, given how violent the responses were to Bud Light on social media. Indeed, in each of the last five weeks, we have seen Miller Lite and Coors Light gain over 200 bps of market share from Bud Light (where market share fell 390 bps most recently).”
Cowen’s consumer research suggests Molson Coors will be able to maintain the market share it’s gaining.
And no matter how Anheuser-Busch tries to salvage its cred, the damage appears to be long-term.
Bud Light has tried to win back customers with a $15 off rebate program on Budweiser, Bud Light, Bud Select and Bud Select 55. While shoppers will need to put out money for the purchases on the front end, once the rebate is processed, the product is essentially free, according to Azer.
Will this be enough to soothe angry consumers? She’s unconvinced.
“Recall there were consumers that were happy to destroy beer they had already purchased,” she said.
CNBC
Target is quickly following them down the rainbow gurgler. In just a fortnight, Target stock has fallen precipitously. So much so that JPMorgan has downgraded the stock.
An even better indicator of how much the consumer backlash is hurting woke capitalism is how fast and how hard the legacy media is rushing to lie about it.
If you follow right-wing media or Twitter, you may have seen a lot of coverage recently about Target’s stock price falling because of outrage over its Pride Month clothing.
It’s conceivable that some investors sold Target because of the negative coverage on Fox News and other right-wing outlets. But Target’s stock went on a nine-day losing streak and hit a three-year low this week because of broader changes in the US economy.
“Fiery but mostly peaceful” CNN is claiming that Target is just part of a market-wide drop in value.
Target’s peers such as Walmart (WMT), Macy’s (M), Dollar General (DG), Dollar Tree (DLTR) and others all fell during that stretch.
CNN
In fact Walmart’s stock dropped just 1% — before climbing even higher than before. Macy’s, ditto. Target has lost nearly a fifth of its value in the last few weeks.
Meanwhile, as Elon Musk recently predicted, momentum is growing for shareholders to launch legal action against woke companies who torpedo their shareholder value by pandering to toxic “progressive” ideologies.
On Tuesday, America First Legal—an activist conservative law firm founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller—published an open call for anyone whose shares in companies like Kohl’s, Anheuser-Busch, Target or any other LGBTQ-friendly company lost value to reach out to them to join a class action lawsuit they potentially hoped to file against the companies.
Of course they had to throw in the Bad Orange Man.
The strategy America First Legal appears to be weighing is commonly referred to in the legal community as a “Stock-Drop Lawsuit.” The practice, first emergent in the 1930s, came at a time the federal government began to require publicly traded companies to publicize their financial information, therefore allowing shareholders to dispute that information’s accuracy—or the company’s aversion to sharing bad news about their company’s financial future—through litigation […]
To be successful, America First Legal would likely need to prove the companies involved in the suit moved forward with LGBTQ-inclusive marketing initiatives with the advanced knowledge it would hurt their share price.
Newsweek
Given that the phenomenon has been so common — even if not so brutal as now hitting Target and Bud Light — that it became a meme in itself, “Get Woke, Go Broke”, there’s a pretty good argument that that is exactly the case. Just ask ESPN, Disney, or Gillette how much money they’ve lost.