BY ALEXIA JAMES

The conservative meme “Go Woke, Go Broke” has always been somewhat misleading. What conservatives wilfully fail to understand is that people are diverse, and you sell more products if you appeal to a broader demographic. Companies that have “gone woke”—if they were truly woke—would stop using slave labour and toxic materials.

Corporations are, by nature, highly conservative. Their so-called “woke” campaigns are often just virtue signalling because the current market supports ethical messaging. In other words, it’s simply capitalism. The moment it becomes more profitable to abandon these stances, they’ll do so without hesitation.

Brands like Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Mattel, Delta, Nike, UPS, Ben & Jerry’s, Converse, Coors, Chrysler, Marshall’s, Google, the NFL, Nabisco, Pepsi, Audi, Patagonia, Gillette, Dove, Target, Levis, Starbucks, and countless others have embraced “woke” policies and seen increased profitability. At the very least, they’ve gained significant name recognition and brand awareness.

Publicly traded companies have a fiduciary duty to maximise profits. If adopting “woke” stances were not profitable, they would stop. It’s really that simple.

This is why it’s amusing to observe the National Trust and the BBC. Neither are capitalist enterprises (although both have commercial divisions), yet they have followed the “Go Woke” trend. By failing to understand and appeal to their core audience, they have alienated customers and are now facing a decline.

The National Trust saw a membership drop of 89,000 in 2023-24, bringing total membership down to 2.62 million. This decline has coincided with accusations that the organisation has embraced a “woke agenda”.

Similarly, the BBC lost around half a million licence fee payers year on year, according to its annual report. At the end of the 2023-24 financial year, there were 23.9 million active TV licences, down from 24.4 million the previous year.

Neither organisation needed to lose paying members. The BBC could have kept Countryfile grounded in reality and parted ways with Chris Packham and Gary Lineker—two of the most irritating (and least impartial) presenters ever. The National Trust could have avoided provoking an anti-woke backlash, as Simon Jenkins astutely pointed out in The Guardian a couple of years ago.   

Ultimately, these failures stem from a lack of proper research. As the saying goes, hard work comes before success—at least in the dictionary.