How to lose sales and alienate people

In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’ Research is launching the free service ‘Woke Alerts’, which texts subscribers news of companies ‘putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers’. Using iconography reminiscent of adverts for those high-frequency plug-ins that ward off mice, the parent website urges shoppers tired of corporations latching onto fashionable left-wing causes to dramatise their displeasure through product boycotts.

The idea is a bit goofy. Yet the app could appeal to a far more than niche market. Only 8 per cent of the US public self-identifies as far left. That leaves a fair whack of folks prospectively unenthralled by progressive corporate posturing. This month, the brewers Anheuser-Busch sent the prancing trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney a customised case of Bud Light, each tin printed with the image of this would-be female exhibitionist. Thanks to Mulvaney’s subsequent TikTok video, in which the parodically feminine convert to my sex preens in a bubble bath slurping from Budweiser’s freebies, Bud Light sales have plummeted. Collective public disgust hived £4.8 billion from Anheuser-Busch’s market value in just a few days.

Nike is next. The sportswear company has also partnered with Mulvaney, who’s been leaping about on camera doing awkward, sissified calisthenics while wearing a Nike running bra. But the purpose of a running bra is to firmly support breasts, and Dylan Mulvaney doesn’t have any breasts. In kind, a recent Honey Birdette lingerie advert features a man wearing a lacy red push-up bra and suspender belt, his tights failing to suppress what Mulvaney dubs ‘the bulge’. ‘My crotch doesn’t look like other women’s crotches sometimes, because mine doesn’t look like a little Barbie pocket,’ the influencer has observed – as if the part of a woman from which children emerge is a cheap bit of plastic.