Yeah, that sounds very familiar. I recently was staying in my mother’s small home town; retail there is a grocery store and a Walmart and that’s it. Anything else requires driving the 40 miles to the nearest not-quite-so-small college town, which has real retail. (This is also true for people in a lot of other small towns in the area, which are even further away.) The irony is that they had a lot more stores when my mother was a child, despite the population having multiplied since (unlike most small towns in America). That was a process that started long before Walmart, when they literally burned down the picturesque historic downtown in the '60s as a training exercise for local firefighters, and they’ve continued generifying the retail landscape since, leaving it totally vulnerable to Walmart’s takeover. Which I know is something that happened, albeit perhaps not in so dramatic a fashion, in a lot of small towns in the US.
I can’t think of another retailer that has the kind of captive market that Walmart does.
Not exactly. It’s the counter-reaction to the call for boycott. If the AFA is boycotting Walmart, maybe I should do the opposite and support them. It’s not the pandering, which people are pretty wise to, but the tribalism.
It’s not about that, though. It’s just about getting media attention for the brands involved. The media attention is the real advertising. Most people won’t care about the “controversy” and only a small number (who are a captive market) will react negatively, but they’ll all be forced to pay attention to the brands.
I was thinking about what would happen if this dynamic was politically reversed, and what impact it would have. I realized it wouldn’t work. Ads that embody values that liberals find distasteful - consumerism, casual misogyny, homophobia, racism? - those are just ads. Those are the kinds of ads that Americans have been regularly seeing since the start of advertising, and the left may not like them, but they don’t throw the kinds of hissy fits that generate secondary advertising.
As a public service, I will note that “As a marketer myself I am loathe to reveal…” is a misspelling. Loathe is to be disgusted by something. Loath (without the “e”) means unwilling. So, as a copyeditor, I am loath to go around correcting other’s spelling. Except I’m not - I kind of like it.
The AFA make some big assumptions about people don’t they? ‘We’ve seen many large corporations reject that in their marketing, but I honestly never thought Walmart would join the cultural revolution and reject the beliefs of its customer base’.
Do they really think no gay people or tolerant people shop at Walmart?
Living in the northeast USA we see a lot of commercials with gay and interracial couples. I often wonder if those same commercials play in the red states. I’m of the mind that they don’t see the same commercials.
If these chuckleheads would boycott Walmart instead for something that actually mattered, like boycotting for paying sub-survival wages and putting Walmart Workers onto the dole for Federal Benefits and boycotting them for selling made-in-China crap to undermine American manufacturing and jobs or boycotting them for the Walton family and heir’s unconscionable dark-money meddling in politics.
But this is America, where ‘liberalism’ means being happy about how yay, gay people can get married and then ignore the reality that the happy couple would starve to death on a minimum wage with and die if they can’t afford healthcare.
