The not-so-secret sauce to success – if the blunt-force backlash faced by numerous corporate entities is any indicator – is not mistaking Twitter banter and fake outrage for general public consensus. Cognizant individuals who frequent Twitter may recognize that most of the grandstanding and posturing is purely cosmetic; derived from an addiction to attention. Corporations and their consultants are not cognizant individuals, they are collectives of nodding idiots.
In a “re-branding” campaign that is leaving many scratching their heads, the underwear company is doing away with the tried and true sexy approach that built the brand, and diving head-first into the shallow pool of the gender-fluid. Victoria Secret will be bringing on trans model Valentina Sampaio, “plus-sized” model Paloma Elesser, lesbian Olympian Megan Rapinoe, and many other hues of new representatives that do not accurately poetry the majority of the company’s consumer base but are sure to get the jazz-hands of approval from a few very loud profiles on Twitter and Reddit. These new “spokespeople” will be featured in a 10 part series of podcasts that will probably make you forget what Victoria’s Secret even does.
Yet even those who are meant to be appeased by this move seem nonplused, as the campaign focuses on hollow lip service and not actually offering larger products.
Victoria’s Secret Chief Executive Officer, Martin Waters, said in a statement about the branding overhaul,
“We needed to stop being about what men want and to be about what women want.”
Ironic, considering that some of the “women” being brought on to showcase the company’s new, generally less appealing concept are, in fact, not female.
Victoria’s Secret is suffering from a bad case of fixing things that aren’t broken. The modern colloquialism of “get woke, go broke” is not spoken for no reason. Alienating your actual market to satisfy another that is actually less concerned with buying bras and panties than they are with capitulation and constantly sifting for things to be mad about, is actually a rather poor business strategy, as they will soon find out. Though, considering how often women seem to pilfer their men’s clothing, perhaps they would have been better off simply introducing a line of boxer briefs.