Guest post: Were there any women in the room?
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Insult # eleventy billion seventeen.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised anymore by this sort of thing, but I find it odd that a company would do this. It’s one thing letting the proverbial intern with insufficient adult supervision fire off an overzealous tweet or two, but unleashing this campaign took time, effort, and money. I’m trying to decide if the people at Hershey’s who did this are True Believers, or if they’ve simply mistaken Twitter for the real world. Who did they consult before they put this together? Was this an internal project, or did someone from outside suggest this?
It’s one thing to stir debate and controversy when you’re selling a newspaper or a movie. Buzz can sell copies and tickets. But when your business is chocolate (and you’ve already been evasive and dilatory on ending the use of child labour in the production of your product, so consistency or real “social justice” isn’t quite your thing), courting controversy that has nothing to do with your brand and its image might not be the smartest move you could make. Did you run any numbers on this? Was the number of customers you might win to your brand by doing this bigger than the number who would drop your product because you’ve centred a man in your attempt to celebrate International Women’s Day?
Who did they consult with when they started to put this together? Were there any women in the room? Did they not know this might piss people off, women particularly? Are you really going to turn adherence to and support of gender ideology a litmus test for those buying your chocolate bars?
Why needlessly introduce an element of inflammatory divisiveness in the marketing of your product? Would you promote a particular political party or religious sect on your candy wrappers and advertisements? Well, like it or not that’s pretty much exactly what you’ve done with this very offensive campaign. Congratulations! You’ve committed an unforced error. You’ve just handed a whole bunch of people an incentive to stop buying your product by saying “Fuck you!” to them. That’s real genius level marketing.
What of the ad agency? You’d think that they would have some idea of the possibility for backlash; public opinion is in their wheelhouse. If they didn’t know that some people would react strongly and negatively to such a campaign, then they were incompetent. This is exactly the reason for which God created focus groups.
Maybe Hershey hired a woke ad company fully committed to Gender Justice, which has divorced itself from reality so much that it has lost sight of the needs of its clients who are trying to sell products in the world as it actually is, not in the world as they wish it was. Maybe their focus groups were just a little too narrow in their candidate recruitment profile. If they were using the same criteria you would use for taking on “sensitivity readers” they’re likely going to miss people who think the whole concept of “gender identity” is bullshit, thereby blinding themselves to the possibility of blowback, backlash, and boycott.
In a market where other people are making a similar product, where switching to another brand is not hard (really, your competitors’ wares are inches away on the same shelf), alienating customers who are in the know and who disagree with the stance you’re pushing is not a smart move. It smacks of ignorance or overconfidence.
If I wanted to get really conspiratorial, I could suggest that someone at Hershey’s, or their ad company, knew exactly what they were doing, and launched this as a false flag operation to discredit the idea of gender identity. Given the reaction, I’d say it certainly hasn’t helped the idea; so if it wasn’t a false flag op., it has failed in that regard. And although it has garnered much more interest and attention to the campaign (more so, sadly, than if they’d highlighted the work and achievements of actual women only; I feel sorry for those women who were roped into this, only to become props in Johnstone’s little validation drama), on the whole, I believe it has not been in the company’s interests. There is such a thing as bad publicity.
Let’s see, your brand has become associated with use of child labour. Now, you could go through the hard work and expense of changing up your source of materials, but that would go right to your cost structure – in the end, difficult and expensive. Not great for shareholders.
You need a quick and cheap way of changing nothing about your business, but associating your brand with progressive virtues. Hmm, how does a $40k donation and some minor print costs sound?
Every day we get greater confirmation that the trans agenda gains its strength from male backlash against feminism. All of the intrusions that men want into women’s spaces and honors have the effect of discouraging women from public activity, spaces, and from that power.
Girls are pushed out of sports. Gays and lesbians are shamed into believing that their sexuality is a “genital fetish.” Children are being pressured into medical procedures and medicines that will affect them for the rest of their lives when nothing is wrong with them that a bit of social de-engineering couldn’t fix.
But the group affected the most are women. We know from recent history that if a trans ID male puts his hat in the ring for any honor or award meant for women, he will get that award. Even on days devoted to women.
Kris Kobach has threatened drugstores who may sell abortion pills in Kansas even though voters overwhelmingly voted for access to abortion, and Walgreen’s caved. If we still maintain that politics are a left-right continuum, it’s pretty obvious that women are getting the squeeze from both ends.