Category: Conservative Counterculture

Not such a Goodyear

By GOLDSMITH on 20 August 2020 • ( 1 Comment )

… and you thought they just sold tyres.

When the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company announced their first quarter 2020 financial numbers, it was a lacklustre affair. Sales were down 15% from the year before. Unit volumes and shipments were also down and so too was the profit. In fact the company reported a $619 million loss (including impairments).

It’s Covid19 time though, so stock markets are likely to forgive and life would go on. And then the company does the unthinkable – it got political!

Conservative warnings to big corporates are now lit up in neon.

‘Get woke, go broke’.

Tired of the of the left-wing, political correct cancel culture; right-wing conservative counterculture is hitting back. And they are doing so with their wallets.

Failing to heed to the warnings and experiences suffered by corporate peers such as Gillette; Goodyear published the following employee dress code. As per usual – some disgruntled employee uploaded it onto Twitter… and then all hell broke loose.

As far as conservatives were concerned, Goodyear had elected to stand with the enemy – and a conservative boycott would ensure.

And it was not just your average run-of-the-mill conservatives calling for the boycott. This message of boycott was coming straight from the top, with US President Donald Trump tweeting –

Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES – They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less! (This is what the Radical Left Democrats do. Two can play the same game, and we have to start playing it now!).
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2020

The message to business has never been clearer.

Sell your product, but keep your politics to yourself.

Do not tell your customers how to vote, think, behave or otherwise.

Do not force your employees to adopt a single political leaning.

Do not assume that you are the authority on all that is good and righteous.

With Goodyear being one of our favourite brand of tyres, we at Goldsmith Money will not be joining in such a boycott. Regardless of how we feel however, this is going to hurt Goodyear and it will hurt badly.

And for our valued readers, the Financially Awakened, the message is also clear. Do not stand in the way of the trending conservative counterculture. This trend is growing stronger each and every day.

Happy trend surfing.

GOLDSMITH.

References:

https://corporate.goodyear.com/en-US/media/news/goodyear-reports-first-quarter-2020-results.html

https://dailycaller.com/2020/08/19/trump-goodyear-tires-limousine-beast/

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/trump-urges-goodyear-boycott-over-its-policy-on-maga-wear-20200820-p55nf5.html

Parler

By GOLDSMITH on 2 July 2020 • ( 1 Comment )

Conservative Counter-Culture strikes again.

Here at Goldsmith Money we pride ourselves on identifying trends early. One of the more recent trends identified is the rise of what some social media pundits are calling the ‘Conservative Counter-Culture’.

This conservative movement is no longer satisfied with ‘populist’ victories at the ballot boxes. These advocates of small and fiscally responsible government, individual rights and freedoms – now demand that their voices be heard!

However, mainstream social media platforms weren’t having a bar of this. These multi-billion dollar platforms were more than happy to censor any political thought stemming from anywhere outside of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Even Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman’s work on free market economics is considered far-right and radical in the current political climate. And he would have likely been stripped of his social media accounts for so called… ‘Hate Speech’.

The final straw for many a conservative thinker however was Twitter flagging a second post of President Donald Trump, on 24 June 2020. They labelled a Tweet with a strong message for protestors, as a ‘violation of their policies.’

Well fed up with the unjust conservative censorship and the tyrannical restrictions on free speech, nearly 1 million conservatives created accounts on the conservative social media platform Parler, in the week that followed – with many in Trump’s team leading the way.

So what is Parler?

Parler claims to be an unbiased social media platform whose content is moderated only based on FCC and US Supreme Court case outcomes. This gives Conservatives reassurance that they will not have their speech arbitrarily censored, based on the daily whims and personal prejudices of the platform’s executive management.

It is not an open slather though – according to FCC and Supreme Court case law, there can be –

No Spam.
No Terrorists.
No Unsolicited Advertisements.
No Defamation.
No Fighting Words or Threats to Harm.
No Blackmail.
No Pornagraphy.
No Indecency (no sexual organs – picture, cartoon or otherwise).
No Obscenity (sexual in nature).
No Bribery.

I imagine that there would be very few conservatives who would actually be turned off by these restrictions though. In fact, if they are anything like me – they would find these policies reassuring.

More important to all this however – how does Parler feel?

It actually feels… FANTASTIC!

The platform is fast and the aesthetics are great, particularly on mobile devices and in ‘night mode’.

The interface is easy to navigate, though give it an hour or two to really learn your way around. Searching for hashtags and people is also easy.

It is early days for me – meaning I do not have many followers yet. This being said, I do have 25 extremely wonderful followers who I do value greatly.

It doesn’t take long before you start to get the addictive taste for all the upvotes, follows and echos (similar to retweets) in the your notification page though… so be careful.

The posting (Parlay) of external website pages is a real plus for Parler. They really do look terrific embedded in the feed.

Another Parley advantage over say Twitter, is that you have a full 1,000 characters per post, verse Twitter’s 280. So you can post a quick thought; or a long one – the choice is yours.

I can see many, many conservatives flocking to Parler over the months and years to come – so Goldsmith Money is happy to build a social media home here. We naturally hope to see you here too. Here is a quicklink to our account page, please be sure to follow.

https://parler.com/profile/GoldsmithMoney/posts

And finally, as this blog post is going straight to Parler – please be sure to hit that upvote button and echo. If you believe that this post adds value to you and the platform, that is.

In my opinion, the conservative movement to Parler, is a huge strike against established social media platforms; and, the financial implications will be sizable! Do you agree? Please be sure to comment below – or in Parler.

Good parlaying friends.

Goldsmith

Gillette v Egard

By GOLDSMITH on 13 March 2020 • ( Leave a comment )

Trends – The Conservative Counterculture.

In January 2019, Gillette launched a bold marketing campaign which aimed to hold men to what they consider to be a higher moral standard. Their television commercial appeared to portray men as privileged bullies, catcallers, misogynists, among other things. The ad ended with the question ‘is this the best a man can get?’ A variation of their iconic ‘Gillette the best a man can get’ slogan.

The advertisement was a hit with many feminists and the metoo movement for its stance against so-called ‘toxic masculinity’. Unfortunately for Gillette, this is not their customer base. The customer backlash against Gillette was enormous. Men who had looked upon the Gillette brand as a symbol of strength and virility, were deliberately destroying their Gillette razors. Also women, tired of the constant bashing of their boys and men, were protesting in a similar manner.

In August 2019, the true power of the consumer was revealed when Gillette’s corporate owner, Procter & Gamble, announced an $8 billion dollar write-down in the value of the Gillette brand. The result was a $5.24 billion loss for the parent company.

The entire write-down may not have been a direct result of the campaign, however it is clear that the ad was a very expensive mistake. Gillette had simply failed to notice a major shift in political and social trends. More careful analysis should have revealed that the long running ‘social justice’ movement was drawing to a close and the new ‘conservative counterculture’ was rapidly emerging.

Conservative (right-wing) YouTube news commentators operating out of their homes had subscribers in the millions. Some of them were engaging larger audiences than of their left-wing, commercial television news network rivals.

Conservative cable news network Fox News, remained the top rated commercial news network in the US, whilst the ratings for its non-conservative rivals were falling terribly.

Then of course there was the ‘populist’ political revolution mentioned previously, which was seeking to reassert national culture, custom and tradition; and, was taking the world by storm.

Despite all the signs, Gillette failed to see the trend and paid the price.

For those who do see the political and social trends and run with them, the rewards can be great. In a response to the Gillette ad, Egard Watch Company swiftly released an advertisement it had been working on which acknowledged the amazing achievement and sacrifices made by men worldwide. Instead of focusing on ‘toxic masculinity’ and the worst in male behaviour – the watch company decided it was time to celebrate the very best.

The Edgard Watch ad was visually effective in depicting men in various and emotion stirring situations. Through each situation it asked a single question, such as ‘Is a man brave?’ It then provided written statistics to answer each question. With regard to this question, the statistic read – “Men account for 93% of workplace fatalities”. At the same time we were watching an heroic fireman carry a young girl out of a burning building.

The response for Edgard Watches was overwhelmingly positive and they were sold out of stock within days. The company had read the changing political and social trends correctly and was very well rewarded by the consumer.

There have been a number of recent marketing initiatives which have triggered a conservative backlash – can you name one or two?

GOLDSMITH