After bleeding cash for months, Bud Light, the beer sponsor of the NFL, was all over the Super Bowl, scrambling to reclaim its core audience of red-blooded Americans. Those once-loyal consumers punted Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light from its status as America’s top-selling beer last year, boycotting the brand after it featured transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney.
Rather than address the marketing failure head-on, company executives are attempting to buy back consumers with nostalgic ad campaigns and superficial gestures, and former President Donald Trump seems all too happy to go along with the charade.
In the lead-up to the big game last week, Trump thrust himself into the fray, encouraging blue-collar America to lighten up and give the beer giant a “second chance.” His reason for crossing the picket line? “Anheuser-Busch is not a Woke company,” he claimed on social media.
As Groucho Marx famously quipped, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
“Woke” or not, both sides of this argument miss the real point. The purpose of a public company is not to advance conservative or progressive social values. Its purpose is to turn a profit.
This is a simple but powerful idea: Businesses serve the common good by focusing on business, not advancing political causes. When they succeed, businesses create wealth for their employees and shareholders, who are then free to support whatever causes they wish. Or, as Milton Friedman warned more than half a century ago in an iconic New York Times essay, when public companies shortchange that process by playing politics, they are “spending someone else’s money” for their own private cause, “in effect imposing taxes … and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent.”
But in recent years, those concerns haven’t stopped corporate America from adopting an insidious platform of self-righteousness: Whether it’s Delta Air Lines pressuring Major League Baseball to move an All-Star Game from Georgia based upon an ignorant and misinformed interpretation of new voting laws, Disney pressuring Florida to embrace an LGBT agenda in elementary schools, or Target and Bud Light openly marketing transgenderism.
Bud Light recklessly charged into identity politics instead of focusing on beer. By prioritizing politics over profitability, it paid a heavy price as sales plummeted and its stock price sank, ultimately failing its employees and shareholders.
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People should demand that companies stop wasting away their profits through frivolous virtue signaling and hold their political leaders to the same standard.
The last thing real conservatives should want is Republican-only businesses as a counterbalance to “woke” businesses. Instead, what we need are the kinds of companies that made America great by focusing on the bottom line, not wokeness.
Marc Short is the former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence and chairman of Advancing American Freedom board.
