Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Rumor ?

Rumor has it that many more companies are considering caving to woke ideology. Is this smart business strategy? Is it good for a company to dis its basic customers by caving? Is this business practice good or not good for the business over the long haul?

Just recently Bud Light acquiesced to the transgender crowd, and

subsequently the value of Anheuser-Busch has dropped significantly. 

Will the drop in the value of Anheuser-Busch continue? … Only time will tell. 

Do we have any relatively recent experience of how a brand name company fared after bowing to woke pressure?

Let’s take a look at Aunt Jemima pancakes and syrup. 

First a little history from Townhall:

The Aunt Jemima brand was one of the longest-running corporate logos in existence. Sure, some of the original branding would be seen as racist by today’s, and possibly even yesterday’s, standards. When Pearl Milling Company started in the late 1880s, it produced a ready-mix pancake flour, and they used a “Mammy”-style POC woman as the logo, taken from posters for a vaudeville revue seen in their Missouri area. 

Pearl Milling Co. struggled and soon sold out to a larger miller in the area, which modified the flour formula and became more successful, renaming the company after the Aunt Jemima brand. The operation was purchased by the Quaker Oats Company in 1926, and over the generations, the famed face of the brand was altered to soften racist subtexts. 

Quaker Oats was acquired by PepsiCo in 2001, and it was the soda giant that then buckled under social pressure in the summer of 2020. The 

rebranding was stretched out. First, the Aunt Jemima image was removed in December 2020, but the name remained in place. Then a very gradual transition  through the summer of 2022. To get a read on the sales results means looking through the financials from then through 2022 – when the full change had taken place and sales were reflected in the reports.

Throughout 2021, the Quaker Foods division saw the pancake mix and syrup sales plunge. The period following the introduction of the name switch that summer reported “a double-digit decline in pancake syrup and mix.” This was matched in the final quarter of that year – when the name change had gone into full effect – with “double-digit declines in pancake syrups and mixes.” 

This downward trend continued through last year. 

The former Aunt Jemima brand declined by at least -50% since the name change. 

This should serve as yet another object lesson for companies looking to enter the woke, DEI-ESG social awareness waters. As seen with Disney last year, and as Bud Light is experiencing now, appeasing and appealing to the woke mobs does not deliver market results. These are not reliable customer bases you are trying to curry favor with, and you are more likely to injure your brand than benefit from your virtue-signaling moves. 

BTW, if you used to buy and like Aunt Jemima pancakes, try Cousin T’s pancake mix. It’s excellent (so is his sense of humor. Cousin T is Terrence K. Williams, a black conservative who is proud to have HIS picture on the box.) 

Just recently, I wrote about Yuengling beer, brewed in Pennsylvania, as an alternative to Bud Light, and the taste test results are in … Yuengling beers are quite good. Better than Bud Light! … and this is not just a rumor!

4/22/23

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