Appearing on Fox News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary, also known as “Mr. Wonderful,” gave a wonderful warning to America’s CEO’s, saying that they need to learn the proper lesson from Target’s boycott disaster.
Specifically, he pointed to the company’s loss of billions in market cap that Target has lost since the boycott began, saying that CEOs need to watch out and try not to alienate or infuriate their customers by taking stances on culture war issues.
Speaking about that to Jesse Watters, O’Leary first said that companies want to show their support for all the current societal pieties, saying, “On one hand, companies want to show their support of diversity in all the mandates that society is discussing openly.”
“On the other hand,” he continued, “the job of a business — particularly from the perspective of an investor — and those that are retired, for example, that own the S&P 500 or own Target stock – are concerned that maybe they’re losing their way in terms of what the prime objective is: your customers, your employees, and your shareholders.”
In other words, the company is there to make money for investors while pleasing customers. Not to be the vanguard of a new moral order. So they should put money and being successful businesses first, not the woke pieties of the current moment.
Continuing, O’Leary noted that if a company, such as Target, strays too far from that goal, then the market is now going to punish it because it’s not maximizing its financial potential. “And so if you start to get too distant or too far away from the primary mandate, the market has proven itself to really, really punish you. And it’s woken up all kinds of boards,” he said.
He then added that companies need to account for the new reality of social media and remember that whatever they do can travel across people’s screens at light speed, making any potential misstep far more costly than it would have been in the past, as there’s not time to back off or correct course. People know about it and can go on the attack immediately. “When you can’t control the message anymore through social media, which is clearly obvious, you better figure out what message you’re putting out before it ever gets out there,” O’Leary said.
O’Leary next presented a possible solution for companies, suggesting the idea of a board committee for a company’s social media page, examining what the risks and rewards are and what the company should do with it, as social media is now such a potent force and older people need to understand it. He said: “We almost need a new committee on boards. We have committees for risk… compensation — We’ve got compliance committees. We need a communications/media committee to advise the rest of the board who don’t even have Twitter accounts or don’t have Facebook or don’t use LinkedIn.”
As an example, he noted that Bud Light was a top beer that was never really considered part of the culture war, but it blew that up in just “32 hours” with the Dylan Mulvaney video, something that a cautious board would have seen and stopped immediately given who generally buys Bud Light beer
He added that there probably wouldn’t be a full roll back of wokeness in corporate America, but that officers might have to think a bit more about the risks they’re creating for the company by taking a certain stance on social media, which can swiftly punish those that take the wrong stance. He said, “I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of people saying, ‘oh, let’s not have diversity officers’. I think that boat sailed. But what they do with their budgets now really matter and the risks they’re putting the company into because of the power of uncontrolled social media is obviously measurable.”
O’Leary’s assertion that companies need to start paying more attention to who and what they support to avoid become known as being on one side of the culture war, or, even worse, hated by both sides, is probably correct. However, it remains to be seen if anyone will take his advice and back off before it’s too late.
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