I was watching a Youtuber named Yellowflash and he was talking about how Superman and Lois has better ratings than Batwoman and Supergirl despite that fact that Superman and Lois has never trended on Twitter and the other two shows have. He was making the point that twitter popularity doesn't equal actual popularity.
It made me wonder if there is a business term for what you see corporations doing by catering to mythical audiences like gaming or comic book companies who think that it is ok to insult their male (especially white males) fanbase because there is some magical group of female gamers that will make them money?
I guess another thing would be the whole "male gaze" thing. Feminists seem so upset by the fact that men like seeing an attractive woman. I mean it is no secret that an attractive male or female lead is an easy way to get at least a little interest from the opposite sex.
But is there an official term from what you see companies do by putting way too much stock in what is trending online?
One of the biggest problems is that almost all major corporate HR and PR departments completely are controlled solely by wokeists.
Another major problem is the rise and growth of the managerial elite. There are way too many managers. Almost all of these people are utterly indoctrinated and they became woke leftists in business school.
The problem is within the companies themselves not just the companies listening to rabid wokesters outside.
Even if they weren't indoctrinated in business school, they get indoctrinated once they get that "manager" title. And if you don't signal you're willing to go with the program, you don't ever get it.
I've seen it happen a few times among my peers, and the transformation is startling every time it happens. Every time I say "surely that guy won't change", and every time he does.
Sloth.
Finding out what normal people think takes effort and dedication. Finding out what the Twitter mob thinks takes almost no time and literally no effort - you just have to open your inbox.
It's far easier to take the free submissions rather than studying or soliciting reactions, but they're every bit as valid as the crackpot letters of old.
Good point. There has always been a cult of the perpetually offended. But it took time to sit down and write an angry letter. A major downside of social media is giving them a platform to whine.
Market research got replaced by the simpler and cheaper social media monitoring.
From my experience they didn't have a term for it because we were told that it was the "right move" or "good for business", even when everyone who crunched the numbers knew it was an outright lie.
We were meetings for hours arguing (well, mostly me arguing) about how some of the trends they were chasing either didn't exist as material gain, or would result in a loss of retention (turns out I was right). But I was consistently told by the higher ups to "Just trust us."
The results were inevitable, and years later I so badly wanted to yell "I told you so" but instead collected severance and never looked back.
Other companies following the same trend even in different market sectors don't actually have a name for it either because they all tell themselves that if things aren't working out it's just the audience who is the problem (I wish I was kidding, but really, this is how it goes in the meetings).
It was always "the audience just isn't engaging during quarter, but we don't know why." Or there's the typical "ugh, people are just so racist/sexist/bigoted/etc.," and they pass off that people not buying into their woke propaganda are the problem, not the product.
It's as exhausting, ridiculous, and retarded as it sounds. But a lot of these companies are still getting by on grants, or buffered by bonds, or getting cash injections from donors or other institutions. It's all a huge racket, because none of this woke stuff is actually selling, but the idea is that they're inculcating the next generation with this nonsense to brainwash all the little kiddies to think it's normal by the time they get older.
I don't know if it's an official term, but "chasing trends" seems to fit.
Women generally make bad decisions. Regardless of whether she is right or wrong she will use social and emotional manipulation to either get men to agree with her hallucination of reality where she made a good decision. Or she will shame, ostracize and otherwise isolate anyone who dares to publicly question or oppose her.
You can bet its the women in these organizations that are pushing for "inclusion" and "diversity" and quashing any product that is focused toward men's enjoyment.
Negligence.
It's really just that simple, these businesses have put the wrong people in the wrong positions, collecting bad data and making bad decisions. Eventually the market always selects for stupidity.
But here's the thing you have to understand this about the comics industry:
They were already dying. They've been dying for a long time, and its only because of consolidation and distribution monopolies that they've been able to hold on in the first place. They were in a position where doing nothing meant definitely dying eventually.
But it seems like comic books were much better in the past. But I get what you’re saying
Virtue signalling?
"Hey, look over here; we're woke!"
You would think Star Wars would be a perfect blueprint for what not to do.
Since people answered the last question so diligently, I'll answer the one asked in the middle: A business term for the magical outer market being pursued.
It's called, depending on the situation, either Overreach or Changing the Target Market. Overreach would be, in an obvious and clear example, let's say Fleshlight saw that women were not buying their pocket puss for some reason (I wonder why?) and so thought they needed to dedicate resources in order to tap that market. New ad campaign, buy off influencers! Same product, new area to sell to! For some reason sales aren't skyrocketing... There IS no market out there, they're just wasting resources reaching for one that doesn't exist, market overreach.
Changing the Target Market instead is actively giving up your existing market in order to seek a new one, or at the very least, sacrificing some resources for the existing market to court the new one. A successful example of this would be My Little Pony changing its market to include the Bronies, changing the show and even the toys to better appeal to that slightly more male and slightly older audience. A hypothetical unsuccessful example would be a steakhouse embracing veganism and removing beef from their menu for PETA reasons because veganism is "in".
Comic book and video game companies think they're doing Overreach, seeking out an Intersectionalist Feminist audience while retaining their own, but are really Changing Their Target Market: They're not just adding more marketing, they're changing the product itself, to make it appeal less to one group, and in theory more to another.
Thanks! That is a great breakdown.
I don’t think so. Maybe like Stanford or some other tech-savvy programs have like adopted their own terms, but there’s nothing that I know of that’s reached common usage. It’s easy to forget that modern tech or Web 2.0 or whatever you wanna call it is incredibly new and the average 45-55 year old manager or business school dean types literally started his career before e-mail had reached widespread use. There’s still an incredible amount of snake oil marketing bullshit surrounding anything tech-related and imo once you start orbiting that tech-sphere, in any industry, you have too much to lose as a professional in discrediting the racket once you’re in on it.
The reality is that they’re just using / doing bad stats with an incredible amount of selection bias.