movielover said:

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You didn't answer the question.

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Neither did you

Cal88 said:

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Musk's problem in broader, more objective terms is that key segments of the business world and media like the advertising industry, corporate boards and hedge funds are increasingly dominated by a political agenda. These actors will collude to punish outliers like Musk, regardless of the potentially positive business/bottom line aspects of his managerial approach.

I think Musk might have been a bit too naive to see that, allegedly being on the spectrum and having a somewhat nerdy predisposition.

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This is hilarious. Musk carries plenty of sway in the business world and one look at the roster of banks he lined up for financing (MS, BofA, Barclays) and equity investors (Sequoia, Andreesen, etc.) will show that your statements are not based in fact.

I suspect you don't have senior level experience in the business world and don't have much familiarity with how public boards make decisions, how hedge funds work or how digital advertising works.

If you did, you would understand how ridiculous your claims are. These boards exist to manage risk, not to promote political agendas. The boards are largely full of old white conservative men who want nothing more than to make another buck. Hedge funds are exactly the same except whiter and more ruthless. Their only agenda is to squeeze more money using whatever leverage they have. There are numerous examples of this. Even if you somehow were to believe that hedge funds didn't care about money and cared about politics, you would understand that some of the biggest GOP donors (Mercers, etc.) are hedge fund managers. They hate paying taxes and they find GOP donations to have a high ROI. Of course they donate across the aisle as well (see Synema, K) which is how they saved the carried interest loophole last year. In any event, hedge funds have no bearing on Twitter's actions as a private company.

Unit2Sucks said:

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Cal88 said:

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Musk's problem in broader, more objective terms is that key segments of the business world and media like the advertising industry, corporate boards and hedge funds are increasingly dominated by a political agenda. These actors will collude to punish outliers like Musk, regardless of the potentially positive business/bottom line aspects of his managerial approach.

I think Musk might have been a bit too naive to see that, allegedly being on the spectrum and having a somewhat nerdy predisposition.

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This is hilarious. Musk carries plenty of sway in the business world and one look at the roster of banks he lined up for financing (MS, BofA, Barclays) and equity investors (Sequoia, Andreesen, etc.) will show that your statements are not based in fact.

I suspect you don't have senior level experience in the business world and don't have much familiarity with how public boards make decisions, how hedge funds work or how digital advertising works.

If you did, you would understand how ridiculous your claims are. These boards exist to manage risk, not to promote political agendas. The boards are largely full of old white conservative men who want nothing more than to make another buck. Hedge funds are exactly the same except whiter and more ruthless. Their only agenda is to squeeze more money using whatever leverage they have. There are numerous examples of this. Even if you somehow were to believe that hedge funds didn't care about money and cared about politics, you would understand that some of the biggest GOP donors (Mercers, etc.) are hedge fund managers. They hate paying taxes and they find GOP donations to have a high ROI. Of course they donate across the aisle as well (see Synema, K) which is how they saved the carried interest loophole last year.

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That`s a bit presumptuous on your part, but not out of character, as a pompous coastal corporate lawyer. I do have a fairly wide exposure to the upper level business culture in the US, as well as in Europe, and Asia, having put my MBA to good use.

Was Gillette`s recent 'toxic masculinity' campaign, in which they've managed to malign their main customer base, an example of a big corporation prioritizing 'making another buck'? ESG, increasingly pushed by big funds, promotes a political agenda over the bottom line. Two examples off the top of my head about how you`re off base about board activism and political agendas being above basic business considerations.

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In any event, hedge funds have no bearing on Twitter's actions as a private company.

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They definitely do, by influencing major corporate advertisers. That was the main point of your post above, you`re totally contradicting yourself here.

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For a lot of these companies, brand protection is their top priority.

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Career and job security come first. That`s why Gillette executives trashing their own brand was secondary to the political dogma which created that ad campaign.

Social justice isn't universally popular in the US, and it certainly is unpopular in nearly all international markets outside of northern Europe, it`s a business liability to push it, especially for international brands like P&G/Gillette.

So why did Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and others, cancel such a popular product if they seek profits?

FTR, you ignore their highly effective advertising which made them a household name.

Cal88 said:

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Quote:

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For a lot of these companies, brand protection is their top priority.

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Career and job security come first. That`s why Gillette executives trashing their own brand was secondary to the political dogma which created that ad campaign.

Social justice isn't universally popular in the US, and it certainly is unpopular in nearly all international markets outside of northern Europe, it`s a business liability to push it, especially for international brands like P&G/Gillette.

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You keep talking about Gillette but you got the story wrong. Gillette was in major decline and had to shake things up. It's finally starting to see sales increases the last few years after a decade plus of declines.

Once again, you've let your conspiracy theory get in the way of facts. The only thing you've proven is that you don't really understand how business works or why decisions are made.

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In the early 2010s much of the progress in the shaving business came from upstarts. Dollar Shave Club undercut prices and built customer loyalty with a $1-per-month subscription model. In an ad, co-founder Michael Dubin questioned why men would spend $20 a month on razors for $19 of it to go to Federer and asked if razors needed "a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a backscratcher, and 10 blades." Paul Polman, who spent 27 years at P&G before becoming CEO of Unilever Plc, bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion in 2016 in a challenge to his former employer's stranglehold on the industry.
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In a blog post in 2017, amid languishing sales, Gillette apologized to its customers for the high cost of its blades and ultimately cut prices.
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Nelson Peltz, the goateed billionaire investor and founder of activist hedge fund Trian Fund Management LP, was incensed at Gillette's weak response. He built a $3.5 billion stake in P&G and won a seat on the board. "I spoke to a lot of the ex-Gillette guys, and you know what they said? If Dollar Shave Club and Larry's or Harry's or whoever the other guy is were around when they were running Gillette, they would have put a group of them together, 5 or 10 guys in a room, and said, 'How do we put these guys out of business now?' " Peltz said on CNBC after disclosing his investment. "That's what should have happened years ago. Didn't happen."
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When Coombe took over in 2018, Gillette's strategists were still brainstorming how to persuade men to shave againor, worse, trying to convince themselves that facial hair was merely a fad. P&G wrote down the value of Gillette, and Coombe began plotting a new course: The company would be inclusive of facial hair for the first time. "I mean, who could defend the position of saying we've got to keep doing what we're doing?" Coombe says. "Because it wasn't working."

About 100 days after Coombe was put in charge, he had a talk with top managers about the future. It was absurd, some said, for Gillette to alienate affluent, urban, millennial men, many of whom now resembled Gillette's mustachioed founder. King Camp's lip hair would've needed combing, waxing, and styling. Who better to help with that?

Many of Coombe's marketers said the strategy wouldn't work given the values the brand traditionally had stood for. "You don't have to go back many years in Gillette's history when, if you came to the world shaving headquarters in Boston, and you were a supplier, advertising agency, or whoever you might be, even a reporter, and you came with a beard, you would not be welcome," Coombe says. But after surveying its target demographic, Gillette realized that its puritanical image was an internal construct. Many of the younger men it interviewed had never heard of the brand. And so the secret development of a line of grooming products began.

It started with P&G trying to define modern-day masculinity. The company noted in marketing research that "men have been wearing beardslong, flowing numbersfor a lot longer than they haven't been. Famous and powerful men, even gods, were rarely depicted without them." It also analyzed changes in gender fluidity, dating culture, and how shifts in men's and women's roles at home and in the workplace had obscured the divide between the sexes.
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The products hit the market in 2020 with vintage-looking navy and copper branding that recalls the colors the company used at its founding. They've been a huge hit: Even as the pandemic upended grooming habits, total sales have reached $200 million.
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King C. Gillette helped P&G's grooming division increase revenue by 6%, to $6.4 billion, in 2021 from the previous year and end almost a decade of annual declines.

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Gillette`s toxic masculinity was actually a major business failure, it's going to go down like the New Coke and other disastrous modern campaigns, so you're wrong on this basic premise.

It was driven by political activism rather than marketing acumen, the kind of activism exhibited here by the head of the parent corporation:

Quartz: In recent years, numerous brands have started approaching conversations about masculinity, or what masculinity means, in their marketing. Is it important for brands to do this? And if so, why?

Carolyn Tastad, group president of P&G North America: 'We believe that advertising has the power to change mindsets. In many cases, it really influences popular culture because it's seen so many times and with such frequency. And so a very big part of our gender equality effort is really focused on leveraging our voice in advertising and media. The Gillette campaign, which I'm so proud of, takes on this other important conversation about modern masculinity. This campaign puts the spotlight on great men holding other men to the highest standards and really being role models for the next generation. We believe we can spark dialogue that can really motivate change.'

https://qz.com/quartzy/1626698/pg-exec-behind-viral-gillette-ad-talks-toxic-masculinity

So enacting social change, changing mindsets, promoting a political agenda by leveraging their advertising and media power, rather than devising marketing and ad campaigns geared towards protecting their brand and improving the bottom line...

As a result of this activist business culture, if you`re a brand manager at Gillette, you`re not likely to be fired for failing in the marketplace due to putting a misguided political agenda above the bottom line, and you will probably not be hired in the first place if you're not in tune with that agenda. IIRC, the head of that Gillette campaign was a woke female Kellogg grad millennial.

Cal88 said:

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Gillette`s toxic masculinity was actually a major business failure, it's going to go down like the New Coke and other disastrous modern campaigns, so you're wrong on this basic premise.

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You are just making stuff up and clearly don't understand the subject matter. Gilette was in a decade plus long slump and needed to shake it up in the face of upstart competition from DSC, Harry's and others. Gilette previously completely owned their market (like Gerber for baby food) and like Gerber, they lost a lot of market share to innovative companies in a relatively short amount of time.

The New Coke thing was totally different. Coke was trying to get the upper hand in the dumb 80's cola war and they shot themselves in the foot. By contrast, Gilette's become more competitive and has started to produce sales growth, which it hadn't for many years. Ironically, given your misunderstanding of how hedge funds work, I showed above how a hedge fund manager pushed them to be more competitive.

Unfortunately, you can't fake time magazine your way out of this one. Sometimes facts matter and that's usually where you fail. You love to take some jazzy narrative you discovered on Putin message boards or whatever and just yadda yadda yadda your way through it. You have no leg to stand on here - Gillette's performance increased once it became a more attractive brand for modern men. If you read the Bloomberg article I quoted, or any other long form change on the turn around at Gillette, you will understand what really happened. I suspect, as always, you prefer to construct your own narrative from which you can make very absolutist, but ungrounded, conclusions that support whatever agenda you happen to be pushing. I don't know how Putin fits in with Procter & Gamble yet, but at some point you will probably slip up and it will become obvious.

For what it's worth, one of the board members at DSC served on one of my company boards and I got to know him quite well. The DSC story was pretty fascinating and P&G/Gillette's neglect of the business fundamentals and failure to adjust as upstarts came to market was obvious to people in real time. Pretending like the real story is that Gillette started failing 20 years ago because they had a marketing campaign you didn't like in 2017 (2019?) is as dumb as anything you've ever written here.

DiabloWags said:

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Unit2Sucks said:

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For what it's worth, one of the board members at DSC served on one of my company boards and I got to know him quite well. The DSC story was pretty fascinating and P&G/Gillette's neglect of the business fundamentals and failure to adjust as upstarts came to market was obvious to people in real time. Pretending like the real story is that Gillette started failing 20 years ago because they had a marketing campaign you didn't like in 2017 (2019?) is as dumb as anything you've ever written here.

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I will give you one guess where Cal88 got his (mis)information from.
The place brought to us by the fraudster Steve Bannon . . . BREITBART.

Gillette Loses $8 Billion as Sales Drop Following Woke Commercials (breitbart.com)

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I didn't even recall the Gillette toxic masculinity campaign until I read the Breitbart story. The commercial seems vaguely familiar but mainly just another dumb commercial. Obviously it had little impact on me.

I got turned off by Gillette about 10-12 years ago when I found their customer shaving advice forum. It was quickly clear that their expert advice to almost every question was to buy their top of the line blades and shaving cream and to use a blade for no more than 4 shaves before disposing it for a new one. I went there because I wasn't happy with my shaves but suggesting I use 2 blades a week at $3-$4 a pop turned me off enough that I started looking at other brands more than I already was doing. I ended up with Walmart blades though lately I got a good deal on eBay from Gillette's own account, so I'm back with Gillette for now. I never have checked out DSC or Harry's because I didn't want even more handles cluttering up my bathroom storage but maybe I'll check them out.

We are like a week of bullying away from "Okay so anyone can buy a blue check and get verified status, but I am rolling out a new visual aid that will display on public figures' profiles to signify it is their real profile."

— Giovanni Colantonio (@MarioPrime) November 7, 2022

A lot of folks have asked about how you'll be able to distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official, which is why we’re introducing the “Official" label to select accounts when we launch. pic.twitter.com/0p2Ae5nWpO

— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 8, 2022

Cal88 said:

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Unit2Sucks said:

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Cal88 said:

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Gillette`s toxic masculinity was actually a major business failure, it's going to go down like the New Coke and other disastrous modern campaigns, so you're wrong on this basic premise.

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You are just making stuff up and clearly don't understand the subject matter. Gilette was in a decade plus long slump and needed to shake it up in the face of upstart competition from DSC, Harry's and others. Gilette previously completely owned their market (like Gerber for baby food) and like Gerber, they lost a lot of market share to innovative companies in a relatively short amount of time.

The New Coke thing was totally different. Coke was trying to get the upper hand in the dumb 80's cola war and they shot themselves in the foot. By contrast, Gilette's become more competitive and has started to produce sales growth, which it hadn't for many years. Ironically, given your misunderstanding of how hedge funds work, I showed above how a hedge fund manager pushed them to be more competitive.

Unfortunately, you can't fake time magazine your way out of this one. Sometimes facts matter and that's usually where you fail. You love to take some jazzy narrative you discovered on Putin message boards or whatever and just yadda yadda yadda your way through it. You have no leg to stand on here - Gillette's performance increased once it became a more attractive brand for modern men. If you read the Bloomberg article I quoted, or any other long form change on the turn around at Gillette, you will understand what really happened. I suspect, as always, you prefer to construct your own narrative from which you can make very absolutist, but ungrounded, conclusions that support whatever agenda you happen to be pushing. I don't know how Putin fits in with Procter & Gamble yet, but at some point you will probably slip up and it will become obvious.

For what it's worth, one of the board members at DSC served on one of my company boards and I got to know him quite well. The DSC story was pretty fascinating and P&G/Gillette's neglect of the business fundamentals and failure to adjust as upstarts came to market was obvious to people in real time. Pretending like the real story is that Gillette started failing 20 years ago because they had a marketing campaign you didn't like in 2017 (2019?) is as dumb as anything you've ever written here.

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Not only are you doubling down on the whacky notion that Gillette`s toxic masculinity campaign was successful, but you've also managed to wedge in Putin into this, along with the usual Time magazine libel, lulz.

Gillette might have recovered from the damage from that campaign, but they didn't continue to use the toxic masculinity preachy theme to get out from the hole they dug themselves in, that's the main sleight of hand you are using here.

Gillette toxic masculinity and New Coke are very similar in that they are both instances where solid, dominant brands that were respected by their main customer base shot themselves in the foot by disrespecting this base.

PS to Diablo: no, I don't like Breitbart, it's definitely not a main source for news for me, too partisan, and not a good source for business and economics. Also a notoriously pro-war site.

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Ironically given your argument, New Coke might be the best thing that ever happened to Coke. They had been losing market share for over a decade to Pepsi so they decided to shake things up. Doing so led to people re-discovering their love for Coke and "classic Coke" brought Coke back to a dominant market position.

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The events of 1985 changed forever the dynamics of the soft-drink industry and the success of The Coca-Cola Company, as the Coca-Cola brand soared to new heights and consumers continued to remember the love they have for Coca-Cola.

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The fact that you think Gillette was a "solid, dominant brand" a few years ago shows again how little you understand business. Gillette had flat or negative growth over a 15 year period. They were getting their asses handed to them. Only after Gillette started paying attention to trends and paid attention to its audience was it able to reverse that. Had Gillette continued down the path they had been going down, they would have continued to shed market share and would have stayed a dinosaur.

You are bringing your political lens to this and drawing the wrong conclusion.

Look at that, @AOC gets to keep her $8 pic.twitter.com/7UKey5X2KE

— farhad manjoo (@fmanjoo) November 9, 2022

okaydo said:

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Look at that, @AOC gets to keep her $8 pic.twitter.com/7UKey5X2KE

— farhad manjoo (@fmanjoo) November 9, 2022

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They removed it, hah! It did make the Chief Twit look pretty silly https://t.co/UvwKRB2TzT

— farhad manjoo (@fmanjoo) November 9, 2022

The role of young people in this election cannot be understated. Turnout delivered on many of these races.

By 2024, Millennials & Gen Z voters will outnumber voters who are Baby Boomers and older, 45/25.

We are beginning to see the political impacts of that generational shift. https://t.co/5U7AcMIgJi

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 9, 2022

Josh McDaniels is out as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, sources tell ESPN. pic.twitter.com/iS58wVVThK

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefterN0T) November 9, 2022

okaydo said:

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Josh McDaniels is out as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, sources tell ESPN. pic.twitter.com/iS58wVVThK

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefterN0T) November 9, 2022

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Ummm.... Booooo for Elon Musk, I guess. Just on general principles.

Everyone talks about politics Twitter endlessly, but sports Twitter is actually the thing keeping this site going. This new blue check thing is gonna tank it so hard, can't wait for NBA trade deadline week. pic.twitter.com/7CO2pcdoBM

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) November 9, 2022

Twitter is wild right now

pic.twitter.com/RMtdnxrPjm

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) November 10, 2022

Elon Musk is a genius pic.twitter.com/GrzZQCNdbC

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) November 11, 2022

We ❤️ apartheid

— AIPAC (@AIPAC_USA) November 11, 2022

To my friends on Twitter, I will be taking a step back from the platform for now. 

Connect with me on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram to stay informed and hear my latest personal and professional updates.

— Sully Sullenberger (@Captsully) November 9, 2022