Meanwhile, conservatives are standing their ground and don't seem to want to relent. At least not yet.
I have even suggested perhaps the boycott should contine despite what the company does since I feel it would have more of an impact to warn other companies that forcing woke culture on its customers is not going to be a good business plan. It is something, I feel, needs to be understood and clearly.
In other words, if companies feel there will be an easy out and only some short-term pain there will be nothing to stop them from considering doing it anyway despite what their customers want or think. They'll just price in the losses.
The latest earnings call with shareholders lead by Anheuser-Busch CEO Michel Doukeris only confirms to me that they continue to not get it. In his comments he didn't really do much to really address how they made their customers feel. In fact, in a way, his comments actually only continued to scold customers. From the first response spokespeople offered that in so many words suggested customers need to just suck it up and be inclusive, to now suggesting customers are hurting "our people and especially our front-line workers."
The latter is true, of course. However, it's not up to the customers to make sure that employee's go home happy with paychecks to feed their families. And that's not to say I have no sympathy for employees or anyone else who may be impacted negatively by the boycott. But ultimately, no one is to blame for any impact but the company itself who made the decision to ignore their customers or to assume their customers would just toe-the-line and not care what kind of marketing the company wanted to do.
In his commentary, the CEO also sort of distanced himself a bit from any responsibility saying essentially, "This was the result of one camp—it was one post, not a formal campaign or advertisements."
Regardless of any of that, when it comes to CEO's, the buck really does stop at their desk and they are ultimately responsible for all things that the company does, including marketing. And let's not forget that no one was ultimately fired for anything. In their words, it was simply a matter of leaves of absense and a little reorganizing of marketing teams. Frankly, and many people caught on to this, that was just a way to make the appearance they were taking things seriously and doing something about it.
But of course, the way it felt was that they did it in a kinda sorta way that seemed to be more of an attempt to "test the customers" and see if it might be enough to backtrack than actually coming out having to admit directly they did anything wrong.
What it feels like to anyone who is following this whole affair, and to anyone who continues to ban Anheuser-Bush drinks from their shopping lists, is that they just want to skirt the issue rather than to actually address customer concerns.
I think that will continue to hurt them. The problem is, and everyone knows it, is that they are still wanting to appease the one group that doesn't really actually matter. The LGBTQ community. Because they only represent about 1% of the population. And they are an even smaller base of their core customers. Because if one thing is true, it's that advocacy groups don't care about companies. They don't care about jobs. They don't care who buys the products. The bottom line is they only care about their cause and the rest of us be damned or pay the consequences if we don't fall in line with what their demands are. And they continue to place heavy pressure on companies like Anheuser-Busch to not back down from their demands and simply ignore their customers and continue to have them force-feed their woke culture come hell or high water.
Doukeris ended his call by saying, "We will continue to learn, meet the moment, and come out stronger, and work tirelessly to do what we do best: Bring people together over a beer and creating a future of more cheers."
In other words, they didn't learn anything because they haven't really signaled they have. They are not meeting the moment, because as of this moment customers have made it clear we are not interested in woke marketing of any kind. And they are not working tirelessly to do anything but try to save their brand while at the same time forcing upon customers "inclusivity" when they say "bring people together."
I grant they are wanting to be careful. But at the same time, what customers are demanding right now is that they (Anheuser-Busch) simply admit that marketing to a 1% group of people forcing down a nation's throat a culture very few people agree with is not being inclusive at all but is rather alienating an entire majority segment of the population and making them out to be the bad guy.
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