If you’re a CEO who runs a company that provides goods and/or services, wouldn’t you want your marketing to drive the largest number of consumers of that product or service you possibly can to your company?
Why would a CEO knowingly attempt any controversial marketing strategy that could produce even a tiny negative result in sales? CEO’s are hired to drive the bottom line up and they are generally fired if that line drops significantly or doesn’t rebound to expected and projected levels.
So why would a CEO downplay significant consequences of a horribly poor marketing decision and indicate such marketing plans will continue? This appears to be the case with Anheuser Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth after backlash from a marketing gimmick involving transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney and the Bud Light brand that saw Budweiser sales plummet.
Theory: I believe this is the result of an ever growing Coporatocracy giving big business greater influence on government and vice versa. A government bailout when things go south in corporate America has become the new corporate welfare policy.
Bad CEOs who drive their company’s profits down with foolish decisions seem to get rewarded if their company is large enough. It’s that “too big to fail” concept we heard about with the banks and car manufacturers. Remember?
Could CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations now believe their woke business policies will be met with tax dollars to shore them up if those policies take profits in the wrong direction? Could ESG and DEI scores be of more value now than actual profits?
In a true Capitalist system, businesses can’t survive on dwindling profits. The only way a business can put political agendas over profits is if government is subsidizing them for placing progressive politics above aggressive sales and profits.
It doesn’t make sense, but then neither does this corporate movement to gain a minuscule market share from tiny fringe demographics, while losing share with huge profitable demos as a result.
Could that be the case?
But this problem of corporate wokeness has another consequence. It erodes the power of the people to truly govern themselves.
How?
“We the people” have two powerful forms of leverage. One is our vote. That lever is designed to help us maintain government by and for the people. If our government representatives are not governing the way we want them to, we can use our votes to boot them out and bring in representatives that will listen and act accordingly.
The second is our dollar. That lever allows us to effectively “vote with our dollars.” If a company is doing things we don’t like we can simply take our dollars elsewhere. In a true Capitalist system the consumer can have significant influence on corporate behavior this way. If companies don’t listen to customers, they risk going out of business when those customers choose to go somewhere else for those same goods or services.
If those two forms of leverage are taken away, whether through forced change or corruption, the people lose their power to peacefully influence their elected leaders and their economy. I say peacefully because the people do have a third form of leverage and that is their sheer numbers. Once the first two are taken away the last is mass protest which, in this case, can turn into violent and bloody revolution.
There is no longer any doubt that our constitutional freedoms, our economic system, and our social and cultural norms are all under attack. The attacker is a familiar one represented by the wild haired, bearded face of Karl Marx and his branded ideology, Marxism. That ideology and all that have spun from it are at the core of today’s seemingly insane political and corporate policies.
Wokeness is just another name for it.
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