'Go woke, go broke’, goes a catchphrase beloved by below-the-line internet commenters when a company adopts a controversially progressive stance. And like so many clichés, its origins have some truth behind them.
When Bud Light partnered a transgender influencer in 2023, it cost its brewer roughly a 28% drop in profits and itself its position as the US’s best-selling beer.
American retail giant Target’s share price took a 10% hit when it launched some controversial Pride-month merchandise in the same year.
Saying you really love a cause when not everybody feels the same way carries corporate risk. And it works both ways: there are protests or boycotts against non-progressive company stances too, of course, whether perceived or otherwise; pushback against corporate ethics that people think are particularly nasty.
Basically, if someone shouts particularly loudly about an issue they say really matters to them, I don’t suppose it should be a surprise when people shout back.
Although it can be: Jaguar said it didn’t mean to send any particular messages, take any stance or alienate anyone with its ‘copy nothing’ advert last year, but that didn’t stop it being perceived that way.
Given that the company doesn’t have any new cars to sell at the moment, it has time to work it out and perhaps, even if it has been wrongly understood, it will inadvertently end up on the right side of things. Because I wonder if the sands are shifting a bit.
Here we must talk about Elon Musk, whose positions as de facto head of the US government’s new Department of Government Efficiency and agitator for right-wing politics and mocker of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on social media bin fire X haven’t been doing his car company any huge favours in recent weeks.
Tesla’s shares are down and, depending on where you look, its sales are too. As the Financial Times titled it last month: “Tesla stock is falling because Elon Musk’s stock is falling.”
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Perhaps Tesla will be added to the list of brands that people use begrudgingly, including Ryanair, Sports Direct and Amazon.
China is a repressive dictatorship that does not tolerate any dissent from its citizens and jails, torture those who do. It has hundreds of thousands of its Uyghur citizens in concentrations camps, and no one know of those people have disappeared, because China does not allow any international media there, nor does it allow its citiczens access to various worldwide news and social media outllets unless tose outlets exactly as the Chinese government dictates them to do.
Also, China decades ago annexed Tibet and has been repressing the democratic freedom of its people ever since, as well as doing the same to the people of Hong Kong. Furthermore, China is constantly threatening to invade Taiwan, a free and democratic country, as it insists Taiwan belongss to China and does not have a right to be a sovereign state.
On top of all that, China also claims the entirety of the South China see (which is almost the size of an ocean), to which it has no legal right to under international law, right up to the shores of several countries that border the sea, like the Philipines, Vietnam, Indonesia etc, constantly harassing and intimidating those countries to accept its bullying claim. China has built several artificial islands on the South China sea and militarised them, demanding any country that sails through the sea to ask China's permission in advance, before doing so.
However, hardly anyone seems bothered about any of this when it comes to buying all sorts of goods made in China - which, let's face it, is most things these days. This of course includes cars from Chinese car companies, which are taking more and more market share from non-Chinese brands, thanks to huge subsidies from the Chinese government for design development (with some estimates at well over $100billion), so that they can price their cars much lower than the competition.
So, China must be loving the fact that Trump and Musk are hogging all the attention, while it quietly sets about dominating the car industry.
What I think could spell trouble for Musk is that he's now aligned himself so strongly with the MAGA train - that he's managed to piss-off the 'progressives' who liked the EV part of Tesla, and potentially the MAGA fundamentalists, who generally wouldn't be seen dead in a 'soy-boy' EV.