Is constantly insulting your core customer base a good marketing strategy?
Imagine a Budweiser Super Bowl ad where the Clydesdales can talk and they spend the entire two minute ad discussing how much they despise country music, pickup trucks, and Christianity. The tagline: “Budweiser: we hate everything you hold dear”.
What do you think that ad would do to Budweiser’s market share?
This is basically the situation Tesla is in. It’s worse than that, though, because a Super Bowl commercial only costs $8 million and Tesla’s CEO has spent hundreds of millions of dollars—and most of his time—alienating the company’s core consumer group. Five years ago owning a brand new Tesla was aspirational for progressive people—a way to project that you cared about the environment but still liked having nice things. Now, in 2025, people in progressive cities casually refer to the company’s CEO as a fascist, mostly because he’s neglecting his day job to focus on his passion project (fascism).
The target demographic for electric cars, right now, is urban and suburban progressives. Electric cars (at least for now) aren’t as obviously practical in the countryside as they are in the city. Conservatives (trained by decades of propaganda to distrust anything that might prevent our increasingly inevitable climate catastrophe) are less likely to consider buying electric cars.
Now, I’m not a marketer, but alienating the core demographic for your product seems like, and I’m using a technical term here, a bad idea. And the data suggest I might be on to something. EV sales are up overall but Tesla sales are down, especially in Europe and California. Sales in Germany, in particular, are down 70 percent year-over-year (they’re touchy about fascism for some reason). Progressive Tesla owners who can afford to are selling their cars at a loss so as to not be associated with the brand. Others are replacing the Tesla badges on their cars, or adding anti-Elon bumper stickers. I suspect their next car purchase may be from another company.
Now, everything in the world is upside down right now, and the worst people on the planet seem to consistently escape consequences for their actions. Maybe this will all work out for Tesla. Maybe conservatives will buy electric vehicles to own the libs and make up the difference (this wouldn’t be the worst outcome, to be honest—we really do need to stop burning fossil fuels if we plan on living on this planet long term).
I can’t help but wonder, though: has any company in history so completely alienated their core demographic? I couldn’t think of any so I asked around online, and someone on Mastodon told me the story of Gerald Ratner. It’s a wild ride.
In the 1980s Ratner ran a chain of jewelry stores in the UK that was popular with working class customers. Then, in 1991, he gave an infamous speech during which he basically stated that his products are bad and that people are dumb for buying them. He called his own products “total crap”. He said that his earrings are cheaper than a grocery store shrimp sandwich and that “the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings”. Sales, shall we say, declined—the company lost £500 million in value as insulted customers shopped elsewhere.
Now, some context was lost during all this. The full speech—which you can watch online—makes an argument that Ratner’s succeeded because they gave people what they want. The message of the overall speech was that there is value in forgoing pretension. Tabloids, understandably, focused more on the shrimp sandwich line.
And that’s what makes the Tesla example so interesting. The CEO of that company isn’t being taken out of context for a single speech—he spends a good chunk of every day posting online about how stupid people who disagree with him are. He truly, deeply, despises progressives and everything they stand for.
Which, again: I’m no marketing expert. But pissing off the majority of your established customer base seems like a bad way to sell cars.
Playing modern games on an ancient TV and other stuff I wrote
I recently wrote about why new tech only feels good for a short time over at PopSci. It’s a little bit outside my wheelhouse—it’s about tech, yes, but also about human psychology means a new TV or computer will never make you happy in the long term. There may be a spike in happiness after a wedding, a promotion at work, or buying a new TV, but that is temporary—people tend to eventually revert to their previous levels of happiness.
Other than that I’ve been keeping busy with things that aren’t yet published but here’s a few Lifehacker pieces that were.
This Free App Shows How Long You’ve Been Using Your Mac Lifehacker There should be a term for applications like this, which raise your awareness of your computer usage without harassing you or bogging you down in statistics.
GIMP 3’s New Features Make the Best Free Image Editor Even Better Lifehacker Honestly, for most people, this is the best image editing application.
Use This App to Send Someone a File Without Using Any Cloud Storage Lifehacker A simple tool that solves a problem, and with a memorable name: file.pizza
‘LikeTones’ Is a Guitar Tuner With No Ads or Upsells Lifehacker Sometimes I get obsessed with finding the right app for me, specifically, an then turn it into an article.
