Rory Sutherland

This is bull.

right?

And the right do it and the left do it.

There's confected outrage on the left, I would argue, about American Eagle, and it's confected outrage on the right.

It's done for signaling purposes by a very narrow group of people.

Do those cases actually damage the business?

I don't know the figures.

Gillette did.

There was an extremely... Now, this wasn't confected outrage because Gillette ran an advertisement.

They realized they had to move on, perhaps, from the best a man can get, despite the fact, obviously, that their customer base is overwhelmingly male for fairly obvious reasons.

And they produced an ad which I would argue, and even my wife would argue, was needlessly insulting towards men in that it conflated the Me Too movement with barbecuing.

In other words, it seemed to take a definition of toxic masculinity, which went the whole spectrum from things which all right-thinking men would quite rightly condemn to things which, for example, two boys having a small scrap on a patch of grass, which all primates play fight.

It's not

You know, don't get me wrong, sorry.

If there's a kid wailing on another kid with a plank of wood, you know, I'll be quick to condemn it.

But I'm not totally, you know, the on-play fighting thing.

Barbecuing, I don't think, is particularly objectionable.

And that was a case where it was almost a kind of act of deliberate effrontery to your core target audience.

The Bud Light thing, to put it in context, was a influencer marketing campaign of which most people in the company were probably unaware.

where they sent personalized candidates of Bud Light to a variety of different influencers, one of whom was Dylan Mulvaney.