How Should Companies Speak Out on Social Issues?

This is a quick reaction to a post at the company blog for a company I'd like to list as a client.

Their post asked "Should companies speak out on social issues?" and found that slight majorities of respondents thought that, yes, big companies should speak out on social issues. 

But which ones, and how? 

Everyone has to remember a Horrible Example: That beer company. That repulsive young person who alienates even genuinely gender-confused people.

If you click over to Twitter, where my page of recent tweets should by now be pretty much limited to Zazzle merchandise, please click around until you find the list of people I follow. The newest one is a person who claims genuinely mixed DNA. Like some gender-chmera animals, as a teenager he developed male characteristics on one side, female on the other. What's that like? He says that during adolescence it was...well, considerably less pleasant than a visit to Hell, the little tourist town in Michigan. "Hell" was his word. I'm paraphrasing where he went into details about the parts and sensations our contract wouldn't let us talk about, here, if we wanted to. Anyway he looks, sounds, and acts like a young Virginia gentleman with some physical quirks that would have no more place in a polite conversation than the icky details of celiac sprue. All further details on genetic gender chimerism are hereby referred to him. He's researched the genetic patterns he does not personally have, for this purpose.

Like every reasonable woman, every reasonable Black American, every reasonable homosexual, every reasonable blue-collar worker, every reasonable person with a disability, he's quick to tell you exactly where left-wing movements in aid of his demographic group have not served his demographic group well. A phenomenon I often notice among us who are conscious of our kind, but not left-wing, is the kind of bitterness that sinks into denial that these movements have served us at all. The unions did a lot on behalf of workers' rights before they morphed into just another level of management that hit laborers up for money. The feminist movement won the theoretical right to equal pay for equal work, and freedom from sexual harassment on the job, even if it also let its male funders exploit it by identifying it with a demand for easier abortions to support male irresponsibility. And so on. People with permanently gender-confused DNA, the chimeras, and people with (partly reversible) gender-confused hormones, the bearded women and abnormally curved men, often say they want less attention, not more, to their difference from other people. They haaated those beer commercials. 

That would be a far cry from noting that some women athletes who are big and may look mannish are 100% female and can have healthy children, and some women athletes who started out as tall, curvey girls and then took steroids and started to look and sound mannish, indisputably do belong on the women's teams...and then there are the nasty boys who want to join the girls' team in order to out-perform the girls on the team, and are riding for a real fall when they meet their generation's heir to Billie Jean King, and I say the sooner the better. 

And oh, by the way, whatever adults have to say to preadolescent children about adult sexuality, even if they want to go into ooey-gooey rhapsodies about how beautiful were the things our Mommies and Daddies did to bring us into this world, most people don't want them even looking at pictures of the children we know. What we want children to hear about sex is that certain parts of the body produce cells that can merge and form zygotes that turn into babies, and those parts of the body must be kept at least three feet apart at all times until people are ready to think about marriage. That is not what most of us heard, nor is it what most of us lived by, but we wish we had. 

So how could the beer company have been supportive of gender-confused human beings? Privately. Tactfully. They could even have hired the Mulvaney kid (sorry, I see it as a kid) to do some sort of actual job in the office or factory. Nobody would have had a problem with that.

In contrast to that, consider the role large companies had in reducing hostility toward homosexuals in the 1990s. They did not endorse some of the raucous "pride" displays of the past, where a "National Association for Man/Boy Love" had screamed "Sex by eight, before it's too late." In fact the corporations demanded that homosexual activists denounce the everlovin' daylights out of creeps who wanted to molest seven-year-old children. But they did hire competent individuals who were homosexual, and not obnoxious. They built a work environment where large numbers of ordinary working-class Americans saw firsthand that the "gay" accountant or editor was a decent person, even a likable person, whom they didn't want to hurt by perpetuating bigotry against homosexuals. Wal-Mart, a growing Southern-based corporation, took credit for making homosexuals respected citizens of several small, conservative Southern towns.

People do not necessarily want to identify a brand with a stand on every social issue. Taking some kinds of positions on some controversial issues will cost a brand. Taking other kinds will boost the brand. 

How can companies know which of their owners' opinions to promote and publicize, and which to keep separate from the brand image? Specific market research, of course.

To maximize the accuracy of a survey, you start by studying two things: what you really want to know, and something else. You want any approval-seeking part of survey respondents' brains to focus on the aspect of the survey that may be informative, but is not what you most immediately want to know. If you want to test for demographic prejudice, for example, in order to reduce the number of false answers given by people seeking approval, you might say you were testing reading comprehension or advertisement effectiveness. Prejudice is distracting. If people are prejudiced against, e.g., Black men, they're likely to score lower on a reading comprehension test when a 500-word reading sample has a Black man's face in the "about the author" section. Using a large, trusted survey service, you could probably survey large enough groups, crediting the same reading sample to different types of authors in different months, to determine the level of prejudice people secretly feel against (or for) Black men. 

That would be a different thing from whether or not those people would intentionally treat a Black man differently from any other kind of visitor to their towns. Almost all Americans now agree that race prejudice is a very bad thing. That does not mean that they react impartially to all kinds of new acquaintances; it means they'll try to be polite to the Black man, and may overcompensate by trying harder to show favorable feelings toward him than they do toward, say, the White British man. 

But how do you know whether their discomfort is with race, as such, as distinct from, say, a preference for men photographed wearing button-down shirts versus T-shirts or vice versa, or a preference for a Black man with a name associated with British West Indians ("Clive Bennington") versus one associated with working-class Americans ("Jaronn Fink")? Further research, of course. 

And then, quite likely, somebody thinks of a new idea that's so good nobody cares what sort of name or face you tack onto it. To sell more product, try rolling the price back to below the standard price in 2019. Inflation-pinched Americans would probably love that idea if you put Mulvaney's name on it.