Q&A: Maker’s Mark Helped Bill Samuels Jr. Make His Mark
Nice interview from Reuters. You can read it here. For a more detailed account of the Maker’s Mark story, read my Kindle book, The Maker’s Mark Story: From Dream to Major Brand in Two Generations.
How to Pick a Cheap Wine That Tastes Expensive
From NerdWallet.
Bowing to the Inevitable, Advertisers Embrace Advocate Role
For decades, advertisers have striven to stay away from any topic that might prove controversial or divisive. Times have changed.
That was a recurring theme during the recently concluded Advertising Week New York, an annual industry conference in Manhattan that has turned into its own global enterprise. (Next year, regional versions of the event will be held in Mexico City, London, Tokyo and Sydney.)
The responsibility of companies, particularly advertisers, to advocate on social issues and to provide a moral compass in a fraught political environment came up repeatedly during the week, Sapna Maheshwari reports in The New York Times. You can read it here.
Comment: Our own feeling is that this is very dangerous, especially in the divided political climate we’re in today. Companies should focus on their products: making them better, cheaper, etc., not on spreading some sort of ideology.
One problem, as noted in the article: Advertising creates stereotypes that shape culture. Becoming an advocate inevitably will lead people on the other side of the issue to denounce you, and may lead to people buying your competitor’s product.
The one place this isn’t true is with employment policies. Our sense is that most of the country is fine with companies focusing on just one thing – ability – in hiring. It’s not the employer’s business whether a person is gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, etc.
But in general, unless you’re selling a product that is specifically oriented to the LGBTQ community, or the heterosexual community, bringing up those issues will inevitably rub people the wrong way.
Liberals watch MSNBC because it echoes back to them, just as conservatives watch Fox News for the same reason. If a company becomes associated with a particular cause, we think it will lose sales from supporters of the other side. And, as the last election showed, one can’t rely upon public opinion polls to tell you what the public really thinks.
One additional point: It is the specific function of religion to teach morality. If Corporate America feels a need to step in, that’s a stinging indictment of today’s religious leaders.
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, of the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, writes on this topic in “Strangers in a Strange Land.”