Get Woke, Go Broke – Johnnie Walker, feminist booze

Today’s society is saturated in propaganda.  The political kind is pretty well-known.  Advertisements are the commercial variety of propaganda.  Sometimes politics bleeds into advertisements.  That’s been going on for quite a while, but the trend has had a great upsurge in recent times.  Some ad agencies are notorious for this stuff.  Sometimes it’s promoted by corporate officers who practice virtue signaling.  Many advertisements with political messages shoehorned into them are downright offensive and will alienate any consumers who doesn’t share their views.

The following isn’t so bad, more like a rather silly example:

Here’s to every voice. Here’s to every step. We partnered with some incredible artists to create powerful poster designs for the Women’s March. To print your own, go to https://t.co/FByJjtGAPT. #walkwithjane #womenswave pic.twitter.com/zqVWA4MS9S

— Johnnie Walker (@JohnnieWalkerUS) January 17, 2019

So Johnnie Walker, a whiskey manufacturer, recently announced that they commissioned some of this stuff.  It’s not clear how much they paid for it, but that would be an interesting detail.

The first poster is the best.  The color scheme is reminiscent of the famous Obama campaign image that we saw so much of prior to the 2008 election, a detail that isn’t easily missed.  However, the production quality is better and has an artistic style with more warmth than the “Obama HOPE” image.  The next one is a female silhouette labeled “re-sist-er” and filled with clenched fists.  Pretty subtle there, huh?  Following that is sort of an onion head with the words “the future is female”.  That one looks rather cringe-worthy.  The last one is a female version of their corporate logo.  This is the only one that’s really applicable to marketing their product.

The comments on the Twitter post were overwhelmingly negative.  One after another, these ranged from witty mockery to scathing remarks.  Here are just a few:

Which one did Farrakhan design?

LOL. Welcome to “Fuck Your Brand Up Month”! You’re late, but this is a strong entry

for fucks sake 😦
Now I have to switch scotch.
Why can’t the morons in the marketing departments just stop with the insane politicking?????

Lol is 2019 the year of woke campaigns that alienate your main consumers

Get woke, go broke.

Others included negative comments about their product, one likening it to “cat piss”.  I’m a beer snob, so I don’t drink much whiskey, and I don’t know what the quality is like.  However, there’s no way their hooch can be literally as nasty as animal urine; that’s just impossible.  Therefore, that comment must have nothing to do with the flavor, and only can be a reaction to this virtue signaling effort.  These posters with feminist and generic leftist themes caused a very negative response.  I didn’t see any that said, “Awesome!  I love politics in my bug juice!”  Irritating customers, and potential ones, is bad business.

What was their marketing department thinking?  What exactly does whiskey have to do with feminism?  Oh, wait a minute – it doesn’t!  In fact, there’s an embarrassing irony here.  These guys should research their history a little better.  The First Wave feminists (long before we got the deranged, spite-filled radicals in the Second Wave and beyond) strongly backed the temperance movement.  They’re the same people who banned alcohol nearly a century ago.  Without support from the suffragettes, Prohibition never would’ve happened.  Well, how about that?

Prohibition was a failed experiment, sensibly repealed later.  Feminism should’ve stopped after the First Wave; after all, they got everything they wanted.  Instead, the later feminists kept doubling down with new demands and shrill rhetoric.  It became a noxious ideology that’s caused terrible damage to our society.  Unlike Prohibition, their failed social engineering efforts aren’t getting rolled back.  Now it’s even polluting the whiskey.

This type of virtue signaling will go on until consumers make it clear to these companies that they don’t want politics bundled with their products.  If you’d like to explain this to Johnnie Walker, go to their feedback page and send them a message.  Please keep comments clean and constructive.