Many upstart marketing departments seem to assume that consumers are either embarrassingly gauche or don’t know what’s best for them.
What was it that precipitated the long-lived boycott of Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light? Was it really the brand’s decision to collaborate with self-described trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney that produced an organic movement dedicated to ditching the product in favor of its many superior competitors? Or was it the idea that resulted in that collaboration in the first place, the notion articulated by Bud Light’s former vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid, who said it was her job to replace the brand’s existing “out of touch” and “fratty” appeal with something new? More likely, Bud Light’s customers ditched the beer because the firm’s marketing campaign communicated in no uncertain terms that they were no longer wanted. Message received.
Bud Light isn’t alone. It’s hard not to notice the crusade that upstart marketing departments are waging against their customer bases predicated on the notion that those consumers are either embarrassingly gauche or don’t know what’s best for them. How else would you describe this self-evidently terrible idea for the promotion of CNN’s new digital service hosted on the streaming service MAX, as reported by Variety:
Among the features the company will try out are ways of alerting Max viewers to breaking news while they are watching something else on the service, whether it be an HBO series, a Turner Classic Movies selection or an old episode of Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”
If Max’s executives think that you do not deserve uninterrupted access to escapist entertainment such that you can shut yourself off to the world, Max’s executives don’t think highly of you at all. The very concept of interrupting a streaming broadcast for anything that fails to amount to a catastrophic and acute emergency suggests at least some discomfort with Max’s mission statement, which is to entertain an audience. But maybe the company and its executives don’t think that is their mission. According to its website, HBO doesn’t just entertain — it “inspires.”
“At the heart of HBO is our passion for making a difference, and every day we are using our platform to educate, inspire thoughtful action, and help make the world a better place,” the site’s boilerplate corporate pablum reads. But a streaming service can only “make the world a better place” at the margins, and only subjectively. What the company can do and do well is entertain people with quality programming that allows them, for just a few blessed minutes, to avoid thinking about the imperfect world into which they were born. If that is not enough for Max’s executives, maybe they’re in the wrong business.