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The brilliant strategy of antagonizing your own supporters
In an effort to connect with the core demographic that has been supporting their sales for decades, Bud Light launched a national ad campaign led by famous trans-sexual Bud Light aficionado Dylan Somebody or other. Surprisingly, this ambitious plan was not entirely successful. As it turns out, there are some Bud Light drinkers out there who are not trans-sexual. This obviously came as a shock to the Bud Light marketing department, all of whom are apparently narcissistic fools who have been completely sheltered from American society, or recent college graduates.
Budweiser lost over $1.4 billion in sales and half of its market share. They’re still trying to salvage what’s left of their company.
Inspired by this resounding success, Jaguar has launched an ad campaign in an effort to connect with the core demographic that has been supporting their sales for decades: trans-sexuals. Observers are waiting with bated breath to see how this might turn out. Is it possible that some Jaguar buyers might take the same view that Kid Rock did to the Bud Light trans-sexual beer campaign? Hard to say, I suppose.
Aston Martin appears to have a better understanding of who exactly they are selling cars to. Even when selling used cars. Check out the message in their ad below, promoting the sales of used Aston Martins: “You know you’re not the first. But do you really care?” Now THAT is marketing. [Editor’s Note: The Aston Martin ad is fake. If you look closely the type says “Pre owed” not “Pre owned.” The picture is taken from the January 2021 German Playboy. The tagline, however, is from a real car ad. BMW used it in a 2008 campaign. Update: Aston Marton is issuing takedown orders to websites republishing the parody. The image has been removed.]
And while I’m sure their marketing department is interested in shaping cultural norms, they apparently are more interested in selling Aston Martin cars. A motivation which would seem to mystify the marketing departments at Budweiser and Jaguar.
I really think this is how Democrats lost this recent election. They simply forgot who their supporters are.
Which is understandable, since I’m not completely certain who their supporters are, either. Democrats were once the party of the working class, but now they are openly contemptuous of anyone who does not have an advanced graduate degree. They’ve done nothing to help Blacks or Hispanics, as those groups are starting to figure out. They still claim to support the very poor, but the very poor don’t vote. Which leaves the very rich, and there are very few of those.
So Democrat ads tend to look as ridiculous as those of Bud Light and Jaguar. They don’t make sense, because they don’t understand who their base is.
And neither do I. And neither does anyone else.
Budweiser is desperately trying to return to its previous business model, which worked so well for them for decades. If Jaguar succeeds in destroying itself, I suspect it will do the same thing.
But I can’t imagine the Democrat party returning to its blue-collar roots. The cosmopolitan elitists in charge would never permit that. On the other hand, the Democrat party obviously can’t stay like this. This is not working.
In the next election, the Democrat party will look a lot different than this. I’m not sure what it will be. But it won’t be this.
Surely.
Nothing focuses the mind like losing. It will be interesting to see where the Democrats go from here.
Published in General
Why should there be any specific policy to “help” blacks or hispanics? Freedom means They can “help” Themselves.
I agree. But when Democrats have been promising exactly that for 60 years, and now blacks & Hispanics are worse off than before, I can see why they might be peeved.
I’m glad you had the guts to print that ad. It captures perfectly how to sell to a targeted, primarily male, demographic . . .
Having spent the last week with quite a few Democrats, your entire post is exactly right. The upper echelon of the party has crossed some lines that their usual supporters will not cross with them.
The Democrats themselves are doing some needed soul searching.
Fascinating times we live in. :)
Well, I don’t think I can afford an Aston Martin, but I am interested in seeing the rest of their ad campaign.
Sometimes an organization decides to change its customer (supporter) base. The organization may want to change its image, or think that a different demographic group would be a more profitable customer or support base. It may not be an irrational decision, but it often comes at high risk.
I understand Jaguar is planning some big announcements at an “art week” somewhere, which announcements may elaborate on the ad we have seen. They may be seeking to change their customer base from traditional bankers and lawyers to more “trendy” “influencers” or some other category of customer.
BudLight for some reason thought transsexuals and transsexual-supporters would provide a better customer base than the traditional “frat brothers.”
Target stores has for more than a decade sought (erratically, in fits and starts) to reject its traditional “suburban mom” customer base and switch to a more urban, trendy, “upscale” customer base. I understand their logic was that the newly sought customers would be fewer but spend more than the traditional customer. Hence things like Target’s going all-in for “transing the kids” and other cultural movements that offended suburban moms.
Perhaps the Democrats see the “working class” as a diminishing base. Democrats may see wealthy, credentialed people with a “woke” outlook as a growing class of supporters that will provide better long-term support than a declining “working class.” Democrats have not abandoned their appeal to the dependent poverty class that they seek to keep there to minimize the upsetting of the apple cart the wealthy, credentialed, woke powers-that-be set up.
I have never understood why anyone would want to drink Bud Light anyway. You don’t have to go all craft beer to drink something decent. I suspect that many tried something else after the Bud Light marketing disaster and found that whichever brand they tried was a heck of a lot better in any case
I don’t watch much TV but I’m in Park City for Thanksgiving and I have the Fox News channel on and they have an advertisement for Jim Cramer on CNBC. Is this a result of NBC’s collapse.
Dr. Bastiat, good post per usual. But I hope you don’t mind my pointing out that in previous months you were fairly pessimistic, believing the Dims would elect Harris through fraud. Perhaps, like you, they felt cheating would make them prosper and their message didn’t matter. I’m torn between wanting to see them learn from their mistakes and wanting to see them repeat them.
Adding to my comment #6, one more on changing (or maybe even adding to) a customer base.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars (at least in the United States) now actively pursues the rapper market, a customer they were probably unaware of twenty years ago. I don’t know if doing so has detracted from their traditional older, old-money clientele, but I see fewer traditionally equipped Rolls-Royce cars (wood, leather, muted colors, understated accessories), and more outrageously customized cars now. I have read that the RR marketing department seeks out rappers to showcase RR cars.
If the rapper market has added to RR sales without detracting from sales to traditional customers, that is one of the few instances of successful expansion of market to a significantly different customer base.
You’re right – I presumed Harris would “win” her “election” after her “campaign”. I was surprised when she didn’t.
I mentioned in a few posts that ever since Biden “won”, the Democrats have been governing as if there would never be another election – as if it was no longer necessary to convince anyone of the wisdom of their policies. Apparently I was mistaken. And apparently, so were the Democrats.
I suspect that the Democrats are just as shocked by this turn of events as I am. It will be interesting to see how they respond.
Perhaps, I suppose. I have no first hand knowledge of their thought process.
But I just can’t believe that’s true. I can’t believe that anyone at Budweiser thought that they could sell more beer to over-educated metrosexual cosmopolitans who pretend to believe that trans-sexuals are an oppressed class, than they could sell to the blue-collar demographic that had made Budweiser enormous amounts of money for decades. That just can’t be true.
I think Budweiser hired over-educated metrosexual cosmopolitans to work in their marketing department. And then management was surprised to learn that their new marketing department was openly contemptuous of their customers.
I’m not sure that Budweiser as a company grew to hate their customers. But their marketing department did. And this is what you get.
And this is what happened to the Democrat Party.
I think.
I suspect the most common mistake is companies thinking they can bring in new customers without offending the existing ones. Which may be possible, but it would require doing something other than what they always seem to do.
Or maybe the traditional customers just aren’t aware of it yet. The probably don’t read the same magazines etc.
I think my #14 applies here. It’s a pretty common mistake in other areas too. And it can work in both directions: Democrat voters think that, once a Trump gets the economy humming etc, they can swap in a Biden and all of that will just keep going, while they also get more Free Stuff.
I agree. Marketing departments (human resources departments also) seem increasingly to be populated with people from a very specific bubble in society, a bubble that disdains and/or is well insulated from large swaths of society.
Democrats seemed surprised that large portions of voters did not worship celebrity the way the Democratic marketing people do. That “working people” like working for things and have values that transcend the material. Democratic marketing people seemed to say, “how backward and antiquated. We’ll have to fix them.”
That has to be the funniest thing I have ever heard on Ricochet.
Why the left does what they do is a mystery even to themselves. Here’s my guess. I heard a California liberal explain why Kamala lost. Just when I thought CA couldn’t surprise me anymore. The guy said she was too far “right wing” to get the vote of the masses. I think the left tries to out-left themselves to and extent where they eat their own. That’s probably why they don’t understand when people stop going to Target, stop drinking Bud Lite, and are surprised when they face discrimination lawsuits over their DEI programs.
Actually, the scary thing is that, given their crazy leftist stance, the election was as close as it was. Almost half of American voters were STILL not put off by the in-your-face lunacy. Almost half of the 75% of Americans who think we are on the wrong track think we aren’t leftist enough. One would hope that we are now beginning to see the cultural pendulum swing back to the right … toward normalcy, but don’t make the mistake that the Reagan Republicans made after his landslide 1984 election and start to think that things are forever different. The American drift to the left has been more or less constant for 100 years. There are ebbs and floods … but the trend is ever leftward.
Among other things…
Sure you can, if it is “Pre owned”…
I’m pretty sure that Aston Martin ad isn’t a real ad.
But it should be.
Have they denied it?
Oh, Lordy me. Here’s a guy (almost 18 minutes)–to be fair, I don’t know who the hell he is, and I’d never heard of him before this–who has started to suss out what I said on this site a few days ago. (No, my new online best friend whoever you are, I wasn’t “surprised by the comparison” because I’d already made it, right here, a few days before you got there.)
The title of his piece on YouTube is “Jaguar thinks it’s the next Apple.”
And there it is, at 2:49 of the video:
The next tag line which appears in the 2024 Jaguar 30-second ad is “copy nothing.” (I am following the pretentious mode of using all lower case, because that’s what they do.” (TBC, I’ve never admired e e cummings all that much, either.)
But, “copy nothing?” Srsly?
The blonde? The hammer? Even just (forgive me) The Orange? All that’s missing in the reboot from forty years ago is what the late Mr. She used to refer to appreciatively in such circumstances as the “simple harmonic motion” of the colorful and original woman’s breasts as she races forward. I’ve never been able to do the supporting (as it were) math, but I sorta get the idea. Only sorry that, in the reboot, and probably out of caution, Jaguar seems to have abandoned actual physics in favor of wokeness and diversity.
I wish Jaguar luck, when it comes to a rebranding which depends on significant and contemporary social values that might otherwise help itself be able to move forward.
The implication from the original ad, and from the Youtube link I’ve cited is that the hammer-wielding characters will release you all from the dark, drab, and boring world of conformity, from groupthink and from whatever rightwing nutjobs lives you fear most.
“So there you have it.
I happen to think there is still a purposeful parallel between the blond with the sledgehnammer in the Jaguar commercial because I think they are paralleling to the blog with the same sledgehammer to the Macintosh ad.
I think they are trying to say “Hey, remember how Apple broke the spell, remember how Apple was for rebels…for the people who refused to be hemmed in?” But “that’s good new for us kids in 2024…”
“We’re the new Apple…”
No. You really are not;
A Jaguar EV might be the just the ticket for any Tesla owner or potential customer who can no longer be associated with Elon Musk.
VDH was talking a bit about National Review and The Bulwark on his last podcast (or one of the last several), and how NR had completely wandered off the map in the same way when Trump rolled in as a presidential candidate. They assumed they knew who their constituency was, and insulted anyone who voted for Trump as an idiot/lunatic/insert derogatory comment here. I don’t read The Bulwark and won’t give it a click, but I know who some of their writers are, and it’s the same approach – insult conservatives you disagree with and then scratch your head (or ass) and wonder why no one subscribes anymore.
The condescension part is what’s galling, but as these idiots fade into the bushes like Homer Simpson, thoughts of them and their presence become smaller and smaller in the rearview.
Regarding the Budweiser promotion of Dylan what’s-his-name, was this a mass-market ad campaign? Or was it a deal where they made some promotional cans, posters, and other materials for gay bars and didn’t think the rest of the world would know or care? Because that seems like a far more likely scenario than them thinking that the whole world is in love with Dylan WHN and the trans/drag queen scene. I’m sure their hope was that they would increase sales a little bit in selected venues.
We live in a country where years after his conviction for rape, a children’s TV cartoon show was made featuring a fictional version of Mike Tyson. If the American people were cool with making a rapist into a hero for children, who would have predicted the whole country would flip out over a few beer cans printed with the likeness of a cross-dresser?
Yes, I think there is something to that.