Get Woke, Go Broke?
For most companies, involvement in culture wars is probably a net negative, but the Devil is in the details.
It’s taken as axiomatic that conservative boycotts of products generally fail. Most famous of these were boycotts of the Disney Parks in the 1990s by the Southern Baptist Convention over Disney’s support of the gay community. It’s come as a surprise then to see conservatives ring up a series of wins over the summer, most famously regarding Bud Light’s partnering with trans woman Dylan Mulvaney. How did conservatives so comprehensively annihilate Bud Light? Have we entered a full stage of “Get Woke, Go Broke?” as the kids say?
As with many things, the answer is “it’s complicated.” After all, Ben and Jerry’s have formed an entire brand on being smugly, sanctimoniously woke and they still sell lots of ice cream. If anything, they tend to get into trouble for not being woke enough such as making a stink over American Indian “stolen” land in the Dakotas, forgetting their own headquarters rests on land once held by Indians (which they’re apparently disinclined to give back.) Or, selling ice cream in Israeli held land in Palestine.
Let’s have a look at several recent kerfuffles and how wokeness has hindered…or not…a product’s success to see how we can riddle out the impact of wokeness on commercial success.
The Death of Bud Light
I’m not a beer drinker, so I have the privilege of not caring at all about Bud Light. But it’s completely fumbled attempt to reach out to “new” customers (read: young, self-declared progressives) will likely be in business textbooks for years to come. What went wrong?
First, as others have written, light beer is a crowded commercial space. It’s easy for angry customers to switch from one brand to another (they all taste like donkey spit to me) with little effort.
Second, reaching out to new audiences can be good, but it’s probably unwise to trash your existing customer base on the way. Unfortunately for Bud Light, Bud Light’s former vice president Alissa Heinerscheid was perceived as insulting existing customers in an interview days before partnering with Mulvaney, referring to existing customers as “fratty” and “out of touch” and implying the brand needed to “evolve” away from them. This was foolish, and Heinerscheid should have stuck to inside voices. Bud Light might have learned some lesson from Gillette razors which saw a significant dip in sales following a commercial on “toxic masculinity” that many saw as simply trashing men. Of course, attributing cause to any single variable in a volatile marketplace is fraught. But at very least, ordinary companies veering suddenly into progressive lanes appears associated with more negatives than positives.
Third, if Bud Light wanted to support trans individuals, Mulvaney may not have been the best spokesperson. To be clear, I wish Mulvaney well, and the abuse she has experienced is inexcusable. However, joyful though she is, Mulvaney’s brand comes across as something of a mix of stereotypes of both teen girls and trans women. In this sense, Mulvaney could have guaranteed uniting not only conservatives but second-wave feminists (two groups that usually loathe one another) against Bud Light. Why not focus on ordinary trans women working blue-collar jobs?
So, Bud Light hit the perfect storm of bad messaging, numerous customer options among other brands, and maybe not the best spokesperson. It’s hard to say when Bud Light might ever recover from this fiasco.
Disney’s Magic Mice say “Rats!”
Disney became famous for their bullet-proof reputation following the failed conservative boycotts of the 1990s. The Disney theme parks, in particular, have one advantage Bud Light doesn’t have: namely a lack of real competition. Sure, if you go to Orlando there’s also
Universal Studios and SeaWorld. But the truth is, these other parks exist not so much as competitors to Disney but rather as parasites (I use this word with all affection…I love SeaWorld in particular) on the tourist hordes Disney brings in. People use Universal and SeaWorld mainly to mix things up during a vacation mostly focused on Disney.
So, it’s been interesting to watch Disney have a no-good, really-bad summer. Their box office has been dismal (aside from Guardians of the Galaxy) and, remarkably, attendance at the theme parks has declined. Disney’s reputation with the general public has likewise declined, now being viewed as a highly polarizing company, which is not exactly on-brand.
Unlike Bud Light’s strategic but ultimately catastrophic decision to “go woke”, Disney appears more reactive. Disney ended up being pressured by progressives into a dumb conflict over teaching of sex and gender with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, where no one is coming out looking good. Disney’s diversity efforts have been clumsy, recasting iconic figures like the Little Mermaid rather than creating new projects with Latin, African or Asian roots. Disney’s newest live action remake has already been dubbed “Snow Woke” given the performative racial casting, weird reimagining of the dwarves as “magical creatures” (ironically eliminating acting jobs for actors with dwarfism in the process) and clumsy interviews by the film’s lead actress (it’s probably unwise to trash the original film you’re remaking, particularly when owned by the same company). Why Disney doesn’t give us new stories with roots outside of Europe is something that astounds me…sure that means risks, but I’m not sure their current approach is working out.
To be fair, not all the movies that have flopped for Disney this summer were woke. Little Mermaid is probably the biggest disappointment (and granted, calling a movie that made hundreds of millions of dollars a “flop” is a bit weird…”underperformed expectations and lost money” is perhaps more accurate.) The mixed woke and non-woke movie failures suggests multiple factors at play (but, again, Guardians of the Galaxy shows that a good Disney movie can succeed). Little Mermaid is probably illustrative of a bad strategy though…a tired remake that clumsily recasts an iconic figure in a blatantly performative way to score “progressive” points, rather than telling a good, fresh story maybe with some new faces. Black Panther good; Little Mermaid bad, probably is the lesson in there somewhere.
As for the Disney parks, is declining attendance due to disgruntlement over their unnecessary fight with Florida or other performative gestures such as removing “ladies and gentlemen” from announcements? It’s hard to say and my guess is that it’s both a non-trivial element, but also working in combination with other factors such as inflation to drive down demand. By contrast, I don’t find the “it’s hot” climate change argument compelling. Florida summers were hot and rainy when I first visited in 1987 and they’re hot and rainy now. Would I stand in line for an hour in the summer under those conditions? No. But I live here, so I can just wait for September when all the tourists go away. But I’d be hard pressed to say this summer feels much different than any other summer in terms of how miserable it would be to stand out in the sun for hours with dehydrating children.
So, unlike Bud Light reeling from a single catastrophic decision, Disney is starting from a stronger place, but seeing its customer base erode somewhat due to a serious of reactive and poorly thought out decisions. As recent as April, the Washington Post was crowing that Disney was immune to conservative boycotts. I think we can say now that’s not the case. I think the difference is that, in the 1990s, the Southern Baptist Convention was largely out of touch with a general public becoming more tolerant of gay rights. Now, progressives pushing gender ideology in schools and Critical Race Theory approaches to race are out of touch with the populace. Disney misjudged this issue.
I’m more bullish on Disney’s long-term prospects, however. If they just stop wading into culture wars and make good movies again, I think they’ll be fine.
Dungeons and Dragons Drools…
Sales and financial data for the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) roleplaying game are hard to come by. However, the Dungeon Craft YouTube site got ahold of the sales data and there are some interesting bits in there.
First, it’s important to note D&D has been experiencing three simultaneous controversies that make it difficult to attribute cause to any one of these. First, D&D definitely has taken a deep dive into race moral panics, and both its public messaging and products such as Journals Through the Radiant Citadel (a book that is, effectively, racially segregated but in a way progressives applaud), and Candlekeep Mysteries appear geared directly toward a very online humanities degree audience. Indeed, with its wheelchair-accessible dungeon and multiple nonbinary NPCs, Candlekeep can feel like an adventure written by political commissars rather than people interested in good stories. And it’s very much a college humanities level of problem to argue that having inherently evil monsters in the game somehow relates to real-life racism. But D&D has also experienced controversies related to trying to retract it’s open licensing as well as hypermonetizing D&D products in ways that are proving unpopular.
Second, D&D enjoys something Bud Light did not. Namely, almost complete market dominance. Dungeon Craft estimates that D&D’s nearest rival in the market, Pathfinder (which also has “gone woke” mooting any advantage there) does approximately 10% of the sales of D&D. So, unlike with Bud Light, there’s simply no credible non-woke competitor for the D&D system.
What we see from the sales data is that core D&D books such as the Players Handbook or Monster Manual sell the best as do other “crunch” books like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. Legacy products such as Curse of Strahd also do well. However, recent products such as Candlekeep Mysteries or Radiant Citadel have, comparatively, done very poorly.
That said, again the situation for D&D is murky and it’s tough to say wokeness is the main driver of poor sales in these areas, when the makers of D&D have managed to poison the well on many issues. 5th edition D&D heavily strategized investment in massive adventure campaigns rather than smaller modules and, aside from legacy products such as Curse of Stradh, it doesn’t look like this has paid off well.
Nonetheless, one need only hang out on D&D forums a bit to see that D&D’s surrender to (and it does feel like that at times) wokeness has split the community of fans into deep acrimony, which is seldom a great thing. D&D also seems to have embraced a version of Bud Light’s messaging, essentially kicking sand in the face of older fans in hopes of picking up newer ones. I’m not sure that’s smart marketing.
So, I’d say D&D is suffering a bit due to multiple issues, wokeness being just one of them. But at the same time, their market dominance may make it difficult for them to feel the sting as much as Bud Light did. It will be interesting to see how things go with the next iteration of D&D as they move into the new OneD&D (or whatever they’re calling it) system.
Barbie’s Brilliant?
It’s easy to make a case by considering only anecdotes that fit the narrative, so let’s examine one that doesn’t. Despite some obviously progressive messaging about patriarchy, yadda, yadda, 2023’s Barbie’s movie became a brilliant success.
More interestingly, Barbie gained the respect of historically non-woke reviewers. So, what was the difference?
The gist seemed to be that, yes, Barbie had some cringe woke moments, but it otherwise was a fun, well-executed film. I think this is an important nuance in the get woke, go broke debate. Wokeness is just one element of many that contribute to a product’s success or failure. Even when marketing toward non-woke audiences a product can succeed with some crud virtue signaling if it is otherwise good. This can be contrasted with the issues for Bud-Light (I get the impression it’s an unremarkable beer), Disney’s lame rehashes or D&D’s weird campaign books that feel like adventuring in a college dormitory. Those products are generally mediocre to bad, and wokeness amplifies the dissatisfaction.
Another example here might be the recent Rings of Power series. Amazon data is murky and whether Rings of Power is a flop or brilliant success is itself a matter of online debate. But its rather clumsy racial casting (including genetically improbable interracial hobbit families) made it polarizing. Rather than a sophisticated attempt to increase diversity in the series, this came across (I think fairly) as pandering to wokeness. That’s a shame as, overall, I didn’t find the show particularly woke otherwise. For instance, in contrast to D&D’s neurotic obsession with avoiding evil monster races because racism, something, something, Rings of Power’s orcs are unapologetically evil. But Rings of Power’s pacing was slow and its writing clunky and cliché (including one literal cavalry riding to the rescue scene). Thus, its overall mehness may have made it more vulnerable to damage of wokeness than the better executed (but perhaps more explicitly woke) Barbie.
Thus, I am left with a few observations.
To Woke or Not to Woke?
1. First, if you can carve out an audience of highly progressive individuals, wokeness can work. This seems to work, ironically, best for upper scale, expensive brands that appeal to the college educated. This is the Ben and Jerry’s approach and it’s worked for them. The only risk here is that the woke eat their own pretty voraciously, and proving to be not-woke-enough is almost guaranteed at some point. Cue the struggle-session apologies.
2. For everyone else, wokeness is probably a net negative.
3. Market dominance can insulate a company pretty nicely. D&D appears to be counting on this, helped along by their only major competitor also being pretty woke, so not an alternative frustrated fans can easily turn to. D&D’s weaknesses is that fans could theoretically stop buying new editions and stick to the one they’ve got. We’ll see what happens here with the newest edition of D&D.
4. Wokeness is weighed against product quality. Thus, a high-quality film such as Barbie soared, despite some wokeness, whereas the more mediocre Rings of Power, or the D&D system, are probably seeing at least some degree of reduced profits due to progressive social signaling.
5. Getting involved in politics probably isn’t great for most products. Again, if you’re Ben and Jerry’s or Kid Rock, picking your consumers exclusively from one side of the political aisle can work. But doing so destroyed Bud Light, and hasn’t been great for either Disney or D&D. I think, in general, many companies vastly overestimated the appetite of the average consumer for progressive virtue signaling on issues such as race, gender, climate change, etc.
6. Companies probably overestimated the degree to which online discourse or, for that matter, legacy news media headlines, represented some kind of societal consensus on moral issues. Companies are learning the hard way that’s not the case.
7. The debate falsely rests on binaries. Granted, the get woke/go broke meme invites binary thinking. Hence you can find businessmen like Mark Cuban defend wokeness by claiming no major company has actually folded because of wokeness. That’s true as far as it goes, and I think we can safely say that Disney or D&D aren’t going to suddenly vanish anytime soon. These are big companies with deep pockets (D&D is owned by Hasbro). The better question is whether wokeness has cost many companies profit and I think the answer here is “yes”. Granted, I think you could say the same were companies to lean too far into conservative politics as well.
8. As Michael Jordan once said, “Republicans buy sneakers too.” Probably no wiser words have been spoken in the world of marketing and more businesses would do well to stay as far away from politics and culture wars as they can.