Isn't it Marketing 101 to know that while insulting a competitor may be acceptable, insulting a competitor's customers might just cut into your profits?

Someone at Burger King didn't get the memo.

According to The Blaze:

Burger King in a tweet last Thursday said it's making a donation to the Human Rights Campaign — a prominent pro-LGBTQ group — for every Ch'King sandwich sold.

Burger King added that the campaign runs through Pride Month and "even on Sundays" — a not-so-subtle rip at Chick-fil-A's long-standing policy of staying closed that day, which reflects the Christian values of Chick-fil-A's founding family.

These are the tweets:

the #ChKing says LGBTQ+ rights!

during #pride month (even on Sundays 👀) your chicken sandwich craving can do good! we are making a donation* to @HRC for every Ch'King sold 🏳️‍🌈

— Burger King (@BurgerKing) June 4, 2021

Which is very much a belittling of Chick-fil-A's practice of not working on Sundays in honor of the Sabbath, as well as a reference to Chick-fil-A's owners being practicing Christians who don't support gay marriage.

Chick-fil-A a boycottable bad guy, you see, Burger King virtuous and good. Such is the messaging.

Now, most people are willing to dismiss a company donating to a cause they don't agree with. Many customers swallowed whole Nike's hideous wokester ads, but went ahead and continued buying their athletic shoes because they make a good product. Chick fil-A also does not discriminate against non-Christians in its hiring, it just looks for quality people who can give good customer service and not steal from the till, the basic things you look for in a good employee. Nobody is being persecuted for their beliefs nor discriminated against as a customer for not aligning with how Chick-fil-A's owners see things.

Burger King though, just had to put them down for it in an ill-advised bid to win new customers. They didn't argue that their food was better, or their food was cheaper, or their food was healthier, they just wanted to sell burgers with the pitch that they were more virtuous than their rivals. The problem with this strategy is that to belittle the rival company is also to belittle the customers, too -- presumably the people they'd like to make into their customers, given that all customers pay with the same kind of money. Chick-fil-A's owners are hardly the only Christians in town, their customers (and Burger King's customers) are Christians, too, at least some of them.

What's more, Burger King should have known this. Past boycotts of Chick-fil-A, even in gay neighborhoods, such as West Hollywood and on Melrose Avenue, were busts. I actually covered that several years ago when I was an editorial writer at Investor's Business Daily.  Gay customers, like anyone, like good food and good service, and there was no discernable change in buying patterns after a leftist boycott was called.

More pointedly, companies such as Coca-Cola and Gillette, which have gone woke, have often found themselves losing money. Get woke, go broke as the saying goes. People don't want a side stuffing of hectoring with their burger order or any consumer product.

The Blaze reports that the ad went down very poorly with the public and published a series of choice tweets. Why companies allow themselves to fall into this trap again and again is rather amazing. They ought to have known that this is not the way to get consumer goodwill. Who's teaching them this nonsense?

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

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