Dylan Mulvaney's promotion of Bud Light beer in 2023 precipitated a social media backlash from some quarters. Photo / Araya Doheny, Getty Images
By Susan Edmunds of RNZ
It’s the catchcry of a certain tranche of X - formerly Twitter - users: Go woke go broke.
It has been levelled at everyone from Budweiser in the United States, which suffered a decline in sales after a social media partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, to Strictly Come Dancing in Britain for its ratings falling when it included same-sex couples and a contestant with dwarfism.
In New Zealand, Mike Hosking asked Patrick Gower - after the confirmation Newshub would close - what he would say to people who said “go woke, go broke”.
The term comes from African-American Vernacular English. Over the past five years it’s been used as an insult from the right wing around the world - and especially in the US - to criticise efforts on anything from the environment to race and gender diversity initiatives.
But global research released this month said the opposite could be true. Brands with more inclusive advertising practices had more sales and higher customer loyalty, the study found, regardless of the product category or where in the world the company was.
Commentators said being “woke” may well benefit New Zealand businesses, too.
Mike Lee, associate professor of marketing at the University of Auckland, said it could help a business if it aligned with customer values.
“It depends who your audience is… if you’re a beer brand like Bud Light and the market segment is a certain type of person with certain values and you decide to use a transgender spokesperson, you could annoy your main market segment, it could lead to a decline in sales.
“But if you’re a brand like Patagonia that’s all about environmental sustainability and fighting climate change, obviously you want to go hard on that.”
The Woke Up NZ website - which according to its FAQ page holds strong anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-abortion and anti-trans views - ranks New Zealand companies according to whether they are “extreme woke”, “woke”, “woke lite” or “not woke”.
But being woke by this measure does not hurt profits - “extreme woke” ANZ is the country’s biggest bank and made a net cash profit of $1.15 billion in the six months to March.
The site accuses it of virtue signalling, being involved in LGBTQ initiatives, supporting the Paris Agreement on climate change and having diversity equity inclusion policies.
ANZ did not want to comment.
The site ranked Hallenstein Glasson “not woke” because it showed no evidence of virtue signalling, no evidence of an LGBTQ “agenda” and had not published any emission reduction targets.
Lee said people could end up using those sorts of rankings because they wanted to support “woke” businesses, or avoid them.
“Whether you go broke because you’ve gone woke or because you haven’t gone woke comes to your market segment, shareholders, customers and what they value.”
Lee said it was hard to quantify the effect a particular marketing campaign or ad campaign could have on a business’ bottom line because there could be other variables happening.
He pointed to backlash against Gillette in 2019, when it ran a campaign that targeted “toxic masculinity”.
“The ad was received very badly and there was a subsequent downturn in the value of the Gillette brand. People said the ad and the backlash must have led to this idea they were going broke because they went woke.
“But what that failed to realise is there is a whole bunch of other things in the background, the competitive landscape - cheap razors coming in from different suppliers - people were growing beards and shaving less, moving to electric razors. All those things were happening anyway.”
Alan McDonald, head of advocacy at the Employers and Manufacturers Association, said if any “woke” businesses were going broke it was probably more to do with them being in a small niche in a small market at a time when discretionary spending was dropping.
“In a wider context you see it in the priority issues for businesses - with sustainability and things like carbon footprints and lowering their emissions dropping down the list of business priorities as economic reality bites.”
Dean Hegarty, co-chief executive at the Responsible Investment Association of Australasia, said working with “woke” principles in mind could be future-proofing.
He said from an investment perspective, planning for things such as climate change and societal changes would often be part of an assessment of risk and represented good business decision-making.
“At a basic level, where you’ve got governments all over the world who’ve made commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, you’ve got strategies and policies put in places to back those ... for you as an investor if you’re trying to assess potential risk and predict outcomes, if you’re not factoring in that shift in economy and society, it’s going to have a negative impact on your ability to predict performance.
“It’s not a ‘do you go woke do you go broke?’”, he adds. “It’s quite literally there are significant opportunities to be gained and there is a lot of risk that can be avoided by taking these factors into account in a really high quality way.”
He said all the research pointed to the fact that if investment funds were factoring in environmental, social and governance factors when they decided how to invest, at worse they would deliver returns similar to the market. But there was a lot of evidence that they could outperform.
He said what “woke” meant in the United States was different to what it would be understood as here.
“It’s something that’s political there, it isn’t here. There’s an element of that that makes it challenging.”
He said when his organisation worked with counterparts in the United States they had to be careful about doing anything “woke”.
“In New Zealand what the Republican party might call woke is actually just decent behaviour, making sure that people have human rights as part of employment conditions… that indigenous rights are upheld. Those are baseline decency elements we’ve done a much better job of incorporating into the way we live.”
Andrew Davies, chief executive at B Lab, which certifies B Corps, said in this part of the world there was sentiment that businesses couldn’t operate with too much “red tape”.
“It doesn’t quite stack up - businesses need certainty, consistency, rules. We see this when governments change.
“Some of the really sharp edges of this [woke] debate are predominantly a US issue, but it’s far more to do with politics than economics or the theory of business.
“You do see debates pop up in this part of the world but they manifest in the idea that business needs to be unregulated. That hasn’t served us too well over the last 50 years. Our region did pretty well through the global financial crisis because we had high levels of regulation in the financial sector. There are all these other stories that say regulation is no bad thing… it’s a softer version of the same debate.”
-RNZ
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