(IntegrityPress.org) – Corporations making nonsensical politicized changes to their products to chase perceived public opinion isn’t new, but moves by two recent corporations have left customers particularly confused. M&Ms, a part of the Mars Inc candy company, recently unveiled a rebrand of its characters as conforming to liberal ideas of gender and sexuality. This rebrand was met with silence by liberals, and was mocked by conservatives.
The move was described by marketing consultants as “trying to jump on the bandwagon” and “potential overthink.” This comes after the 2020 erasure of nonwhite branding from popular food brands like Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s, and Land O Lakes, which were all labeled as racist by activists. It was thought likely, that M&Ms was attempting to preempt a similar moral panic in the future. Now, we’ve come to find out that it was all “just a PR stunt.”
At the same time, Xbox attracted significant backlash from gamers for its new “carbon aware” stance. A press release was made in which there were commitments to becoming “carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste.” It is unknown if these commitments apply only to Xbox or to Microsoft as a whole. However, only a single concrete plan to combat climate change was revealed: Microsoft put out an update which causes the gamer’s Xbox to fully shut down, rather than go into sleep mode, saving some power at the cost of increasing boot up time. This exporting of responsibility to the consumer was not met well at all, growing so large that even Senator Ted Cruz of Texas weighed in, saying “First gas stoves, then your coffee, now they’re gunning for your Xbox.”
The moral grandstanding of both companies has been roundly condemned, with many observers pointing to the blatant hypocrisy of the brands’ corporate owners. Xbox’s climate saving updates were mocked as a decision “made on one of the company’s private jets,” highlighting the bizarre optics of Microsoft’s wealthy management insisting that the poor and middle classes make up for their carbon footprint. Mars Inc, the owner of M&Ms was noted as one of the many companies that have apologized to the totalitarian Communist state and serial human rights abuser China for accidentally mentioning the country of Taiwan.
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