At Liberal Patriot Ruy Teixeira offers advice to the Democrats I see little way they can accept:
Three months after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the party is still reeling—leaderless, rudderless, and historically unpopular. Only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, the lowest rating since CNN first asked the question in 1992. Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina.
Think party pooh-bahs realize it is time for urgent change? Think again.
Viral video clips from the Democratic National Committee’s election for a new chair this past weekend seemed like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college. In one, outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison explains how the presence of a gender nonbinary candidate affected the committee’s gender-balance rules. (“The nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”) In another, every candidate for chair blamed Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump on racism and misogyny.
No word on whether they debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
He recommends that Democrats
- Avoid the name-calling
- Moderate starting with immigration
- Cooperate with Trump when he’s right. He offers Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion reform as an example.
- Embrace energy abundance
Shorter: abandon the views of the progressive wing of the party. Since progressives are now the largest faction among the Democrats, how can they do that? I don’t see it.
I hope Dave will indulge me. But I found this article interesting and instructive, and germane enough to the title of the essay, and frequent topics here. The issue is InBev going woke, and brand management.
As Dave likes to say, this is the kernel. But I highly recommend reading the whole thing, link below. This will be business school case stuff forever.
“Milton Friedman said the social responsibility of business is to make a profit. Why the focus on UN ESG goals, SDG goals; why is that so important to AB InBev?”
Doukeris’s (Drew: this is the CEO) response was telling: “Of course, profit is one of the goals of the company, and that’s why companies exist—to deploy capital and to be able to compensate the shareholders [by] having returns on the capital that you deploy. But our role goes far beyond that.” He went on to explain how ESG is integrated into executive compensation and how “financial goals, commercial goals, ESG goals, they need to be aligned for us to deliver on the purpose and overall goals of the company.”
First, a technical point. Milton Friedman never said maximize profits. He said do whatever maximizes shareholder value. That might, might, include concepts espoused by he CEO in the article. But not too much empirical evidence for that. The corporation is not a play toy for infants running the place.
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-sad-saga-of-bud-light
We are a rich and self indulgent culture here in the US. Taylor Swift matters. The national debt doesn’t. We have known relatively little hardship since WWII. So you can play high school Charlie Fuckaround with DEI or any other woke nonsense. But the country is in financial extremis, unless we want to suffer a gigantic inflation, and the attendant social discord.
I don’t think the Progressives are wise enough, technically trained enough or scarred enough to understand. They must be defeated. Time runs short.
Interesting story Drew, but let’s add some stuff the story left out. Link below goes to InBev historical stock price going back to 2009. Note that the stock price now is well above some lows before the Mulvaney ad and before DEI. It’s also notable that if this article had been published in September the stock price would have been almost identical to the price the day before the Mulvaney ad. So there is a bit of cherry picking here.
However, actually looking at the stock, trying to avoid the usual data free arguments based upon feelings. the real take home is that the stock peaked in 2016 and was in a steady downfall ever since. Your author just glosses over this. InBev was not the powerhouse before DEI that he wants to claim it was. The stock peaked in 2016 around $132 and by the time the DEI CEO took over it was about $60. In context, InBev was failing well before DEI came along. In that light it looks like an attempt was made to reach a new customer base since current marketing efforts aimed only at manly men was failing. In retrospect it failed as the non-manly men weren’t interested and the manly men were offended. They took a risk and failed.
I also think your author misrepresented the Mulvaney thing as a campaign. It was a single piece on Youtube (not sure about Youtube). One single ad, not a big commitment. So what really happened was that a bunch of manly men Bud drinkers canceled InBev because they were offended.
Finally, it’s the age of the internet. It’s really easy to find historical stock prices if that is the issue that concerns you. It’s disappointing that people just blindly accept a story when it fits into their prior beliefs.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/anheuser-busch-inbev/stock-price-history/
You are, as always, being very disingenuous, steve. The article, nor my point, is InBev/AB’s stock price, but rather the destruction of its iconic brand. Stock prices will move for many reasons; your diversion doesn’t even address this. You just want to change the subject.
Perhaps this is the real kernel:
(From the author/executive)
“What went wrong at Bud Light? As the former president of the Anheuser-Busch Sales and Distribution Company—and an 11-year veteran of the company—I can tell you, this was no isolated mistake. It was the culmination of years during which Anheuser-Busch InBev, having failed to deliver new products, catchy campaigns, or fresh ideas, turned to what amounted to corporate progressivism, with an emphasis on what’s called ESG—environmental, social, and governance policies favored by the left.”
Steve, the ad was an event. The immediate reaction is the press was overwhelming. Sales quickly declined 20%. And since you want to talk issues other than the effect of the policy on the brand, billions of dollars in market cap and many jobs were vaporized.
Do your spin, change the subject, avoid the issue, all you usually do. But the bottom line is that sales of Bud Light have ultimately plummeted 40% since they shot their dicks off. The brand went from #1 to #3. In a business like this (or, say, Coke vs Pepsi) where brand managers would sell their mothers for tenths of a point of share, this was a thermonuclear explosion.
Steve, the beer tastes the same. They didn’t suddenly lose slotting allowances out of nowhere. They destroyed their brand image. Period, full stop.
I had asked for Dave’s indulgence. I should have anticipated steves totally disingenuous response.
So to the query in Daves post. No, I don’t see how they can adopt those views. Old line Dems may be just going along, but the party is dominated by the progressives. And its obvious they didn’t learn a thing. The plane is losing altitude quickly, and needs to pull up ASAP.
Despite my unabashed conservative views, I believe in counterbalances in politics. Either side can go off the rails. But right now the progressives are simply nuts. We need something rational on the left.
Drew- IOW, the company had stagnated and was sliding downhill. What was an iconic brand in the past was becoming just another iconic product that was fading into the background like many another beer. In that context they tried to broaden their appeal. They guessed wrong. Meh. Not the first company to do that.
The thing about DEI after having done a fair bit of reading over a long period of time is that it’s hard to find that it had much effect. In 2021 after Floyd there was a surge in minority hirings but overall there hasn’t been much change. It’s mostly amounted to a bunch of talk and maybe some wasted money at larger institutions when they hire a diversity director. I have always opposed DEI programs because they were ineffective at best or a scam at worst but you seem to believe they were actually working.
Steve
Oops, forgot. Link goes to AB revenue for last 15 years. If the claim is that ESG, wokeness destroyed AB its hard to see it in revenues. If its woeness and ESG one would expect the entire company to be affected. Instead, it looks like at a time when alcohol consumption in general is down their decision to broaden their appeal has generally worked well, except for Bud Light. Should we also note that the same woke company that had Bud light drop to 3rd has at the same time promoted its Michelob Ultra into 2nd in sales?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BUD/anheuser-busch/revenue
Steve
Again, Steve, you want to change the subject and spin, spin, spin.
Now you want to talk revenues. You want to talk the general product portfolio.
The author/executive of that article even points out the long term stagnation at InBev. Share prices dove in 2016/2017.
But you obviously have an agenda: woke couldn’t be a problem. So dance around the obvious: sales plummet; market position goes from 1 to 3 right on que with the brand destruction/ad. Stick to medicine.
Full disclosure: my next door neighbor in CT was an up and coming InBev exec. Now a senior guy. He tells me that internally they know it was a blunder of once in a lifetime proportions. Trying to recover. This years ad will be traditional Bud Light. Dudes having fun being dudes.
Give it a rest, Steve. You got caught talking crap. Not unusual.
That includes many disaffected people on the political left.
Dave Schuler: Shorter: abandon the views of the progressive wing of the party.
In a two-party system, the majority party, with power and being larger, tends to be more heterogeneous with various coalitions vying against one another within the majority to wield that power. The minority party, with little power and being smaller, tends to become more homogeneous and partisan; and as the coalition is smaller, they have less need to compromise within their caucus or with the other party.
The minority is also able to blame the ruling party, rightly or wrongly, because they are not constrained by trying to retain power, and while they may have a coherent message, they will usually not have to offer an actually coherent governing plan.
Yes, it was a blunder, but in context it was a stagnating company and they were in a stagnating market. (Of course your buddy knew it wouldn’t work. Everyone always distances themselves from failure.) They made an attempt to broaden their appeal and with Bud Light it didnt work but elsewhere it looks to be doing ok. As much as you want to avoid numbers and concentrate on wokeness destroying the company beer sales were down 3% in 2022 and 5% in 2023.
So while you look only at their Bud Light brand and then condemn the whole company for being woke, what the numbers show is a company doing OK in a down market ie while Bud light strategy failed their other ideas are doing OK.
If this happened to a company with conservative leaders you would call this being canceled.
Steve
Drew: the ad was an event.
It was a case of narrow marketing, meaning most people would never see it, just fans of Dylan Mulvaney. Other narrow marketing campaigns are used to reach other audiences. However, once it made it into the right-wing echochamber, it became a cause. Sad really. “They” won’t let you beat up on gays, so trans people have to bear the brunt of the right-wing hate machine. Can’t call liberals
n-word-loversanymore, so now either liberals have to distance themselves from yet another persecuted minority or suffer the social and political cost of being called a {fill in the blank}-lover.steve: If this happened to a company with conservative leaders you would call this being canceled.
Meanwhile, the highest echelons of the Republican Party are now intent on bringing back to the highest ranks of DOGE an avowed racist.
OT, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has given us estimates for the costs of the proposed Trump tax cuts. They project another $5-$11 trillion dollars added on to our debt. Thank heavens we dont have DEI people in charge of the budget.
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/trump-tax-priorities-total-5-11-trillion
Steve
“As much as you want to avoid numbers and concentrate on wokeness destroying the company beer sales were down 3% in 2022 and 5% in 2023.”
Sigh. You amuse,Steve. It was a Bud Light commercial, not a “beer commercial”. If you had an analytical bone in your body you would argue that Bud Light sales, were down 37-35%, adjusted for overall beer sales. But you are a cultist. Maybe more accurately, a sophist.
“If this happened to a company with conservative leaders you would call this being canceled.”
You’ve been reduced to faux mind reading. A fish on the dock flopping and gasping for air. Meanwhile, Zach publicly embarrasses himself with notions of “narrow” marketing, while the brands entire volume declines.
You guys really don’t understand the public thinks you are idiots. Dave must be beside himself. What happened to Democrats? Progressives have taken the party to the depths of hell.
I think I need to apologize to Dave.
A simple, tangential, observation stole the thread. Not my intention.