Here’s one that made me chuckle:
Gunmaker Heckler & Koch tweeted agreement Tuesday with Miller Lite’s woke campaign against using sexy women — “bunnies” — to sell products, then doubled down in a second tweet, describing ad campaigns that objectify women as “trash marketing.”
…
On Tuesday, Heckler & Koch doubled down, responding to accusations that they have become “woke” by giving a detailed explanation of their opposition of “objectifying women” in selling guns:
Wow- woke? Allow me to translate: objectifying women was never a good marketing strategy. In the firearms industry, that was a prominent strategy up until recently. Many industries have done that (including beer corps).
As an actual woman typing this, I’ll use more words for you to comprehend: using bunnies to sell products is trash marketing. Supporting women by not doing that is good.
Of course, it’s easy to say all that bullshit when your target market isn’t men buying guns for their womenfolk (unlike light beer). If it was, H&K (who, as Larry Correia reminds us, think we all suck anyway) would paint bikini models on the oversized grips of their overpriced guns.
And by the way — and this applies to all gun companies — your job is not to “support women” by uttering platitudes like the above. Your job is to support women by making guns that they can actually shoot. (Last time I looked, H&K is kinda lean in that product description.)
As with light beer, I can’t boycott H&K products because I’ve never owned one in the first place — mostly because of H&K’s Ferrari-like premium prices. (Only unlike Ferrari, whose cars are arguably worth the $$$$, H&K guns aren’t.)
Anyway, it’s all bullshit. Manufacturers have been using beautiful women to sell their products ever since Mrs. Aarg preferred Mrs. Thaarg’s leopardskin loincloth. That’s not going to change, ever.
Bloody fools.
I’ll keep this simple.
FUK H&K
I think this is generational.
Marketing techniques depend on who your target audience is. It used to be that Sex Sells even to women. Cosmetic advertisements and women’s products in general have historically used tall, think, beautiful women to hawk their wares. Older women and men have been subjected to this for decades.
Recently however, the pendulum has been swinging away these types of women (think 1980s-90s Brooke Shields) toward women of more (shall we say) realistic proportions and image. Younger millenniums and Gen Z are actually starting to expect to see fatter, shorter, and even uglier women in advertising, and I think marketing is starting to reflect that.
The problem is that instead of just doing it and shutting the fuck up, marketers are overtly announcing their intentions to grab attention from the younger generation while alienating the older generations. This is also generational as kids today can’t silently do anything. Instead they have to shout it from the rooftops as if to say, ‘look at me and how great I am’. The same way an old fuddy-duddy like me might privately write a check to my favorite charity, whereas a 20-something would film himself giving one of those giant Ed McMahon checks and post it all over social media.
We’re just wired differently.
*tall, thin, beautiful… (ducking auto-correct)
Dear Auto-correct, it’s never “duck”.
Ravenwood,
Well said
JQ
Social attitudes change over time. What was perfectly acceptable and expected yesterday is iffy today and on the dustbin of history tomorrow. ‘Twas ever thus. I’m anything BUT “woke” but even I have been noticing commercials & ads that leave me cringing which I wouldn’t have thought twice about not too long ago.
I have no problem with companies such as H&K, Budweiser, and Miller changing their marketing. It’s a marketing department’s job to become aware of the changing social climate and adjust accordingly. As Ravenwood says, it’s the “instead of just doing it and shutting the fuck up, marketers are overtly announcing their intentions to grab attention” which is causing the problems. If H&K had just silently stopped using “bunnies” nobody would have said a word. Those who didn’t like them would have noticed and their opinion of H&K would have gone up. Win-win for H&K. But nooooo, they gotta make a big deal of it and now they’re alienating their core market.
Moral of the story: if you’ve decided you need to change your marketing to follow the new social climate just do it and keep your mouth shut.
booth bunnies have been diminishing at SHOT for years from what I hear. Same goes for other trade events as well I suppose. Removing these models from advertising is rather silly. The pretty pictures whether the outdoors, tactical whatnot or ruggedness, or pretty women attracts attention then the customer learns about the product. This attention getting with pretty women reaches the base core of men, the sex drive instinct. It’s always been there and rooted into our core regardless of how “civilized” we get.
JQ
It’s just like Formula 1 getting rid of Grid Girls, the woke bastards.
Booth bunnies, Grid Girls, models have to eat too so they need gainful employment that suits their skills. Do you really want any of these women doing open heart surgery on you? More than likely not.
JQ
HK marketing?
Wasn’t that the group that had the ammo loaded backwards in a magazine used in an advertising campaign?
Larry Correia had them pegged years ago,
HK’s products, like most mechanical stuff from Germania, can be best described in three lines:
Over Engineered;
Over Weight; &
Over Priced!
Regarding H&K, lovely guns, over-engineered and all, would love to have purchased an H&K 91, but in the end, I say Buy American. For handguns, I’ve been a S&W man since 1984 (with only a brief hiatus in the 90’s when S&W kowtowed to Bill Clinton and Janet Reno), and for rifles, I’m a Ruger guy. And this is from someone who is proud of being Hessen, West Prussian und Ost Friesisch in ancestry. I *should* like H&K, Walther, Mauser, Blaser, etc., but don’t care.
I think a lot of companies overestimate the effectiveness of using bunnies to advertise their product. Yeah, the eye candy catches my attention, but I’ve never been deluded that I would have young, voluptuous, nubile women crawling over me if I purchased their product. But if they want to advertise using bunnies, I have no objection since I believe in traditional male and female role models, and there will always be women willing to sell their looks.
The virtue signalling that companies do now both amazes and disgusts me. They depend on us conservatives to “forgive and forget” and continue to purchase their wares. Sorry, very sorry, that platitude is burned up and blown away with the wind. There will be no more nice guy playing fair and naively expecting the opposition to do likewise. Anheuser-Busch, Procter and Gamble, Levi Strauss & Co, Wally World… eff off, I say. The last time I bought an AB product was a six pack of Michelob something-or-the-other in cans ten years ago because (a) Port Aransas Beach prohibited glass bottles, and (b) the liquor store didn’t have bloody anything more palatable. I’ll continue to boycott AB harder, I guess.
Keep up the good fight.
The Old Fart in Albuquerque