Tag: growth

P&G growth before and after Gillette ad

Gillette: get woke, go broke? How Gillette’s “woke” advertisement stifled their parent company’s growth

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

Get woke, go broke? Some have argued that Gillette’s parent company benefited from the Gillette ad, citing the spike in stock value that took place over a week after the ad ran. Others argue that the ad harmed Gillette’s stock and was a net negative.

P&G growth before and after Gillette ad
P&G growth before and after the Gillette “The Best Men Can Be” ad. Yes, I know that I started a couple of the lines on the wrong data point, but the calculations and dates in the text are correct.

Here, we see the truth. Gillette’s parent company, P&G, was growing at a rate of $0.12 in value per day from May 31, 2018 to December 14, 2018. There was a big drop at Christmas (not unusual for a retail company’s value to drop after the busy holiday buying season ends) and there was a correction one month later. The Gillette ad ran near the end of the low period spanning the first three weeks in January.

Zoomed out, it may appear that the ad caused the spike in stock value, but zooming in shows that the entire week after the ad was put out represented a loss in value, NOT a gain. The facts speak for themselves: if the ad had any short-term effect at all, it was a negative effect.

The subsequent spike is also easily explained. Because the ad was controversial and the stock spent a week dropping, bullish investors could see that a correction was overdue from the December drop and took the opportunity to buy while the price was going down so they could ride the stock on its way back up. This kicked off the expected correction.

What is most interesting about the charts (and ignored by those who endorse fact-free “woke” political agendas) is the long-term growth rate. Before the drop and correction, they were gaining value at $0.12 per day, but after the Gillette ad ran (and the expected correction from the December drop was finished), this dropped to $0.10 per day, a loss of 1/6 (16.67%) of the entire company’s growth. P&G is a huge company and Gillette is only one of their many brands; 19 of their brands rake in over $1 billion annually, and Gillette is one of those brands.

1/19 of the company’s biggest brands killed 1/6 of the company’s growth with a single “woke” advertisement. Get woke, go broke, indeed.

This was written up because of a comment by “Old Blanco Rd Productions” on a Coffee Break video about “woke advertising” on YouTube. Notably, this commenter would repeatedly try to pull the conversation back to an advertisement by Nike featuring Colin Kaepernick, an ad which caused some controversy because Colin is the originator of the “take a knee during the national anthem” thing at football games. The same commenter didn’t want to talk about Gillette and P&G and was only interested in Nike and pushing the statement that “Nike added $6 billion in value after the Colin Kaepernick commercial!” Typical bullshit accusations of “sealioning” by a “Spencer Person” ensued, though sealioning is nothing more than a logically fallacious attempt to discredit people who demand that you support your arguments with facts. Quoting from that last link: “In other words, “sealioning” is a gag to be imposed upon people you disagree with if they argue with you for too long, too persistently, or in any fashion that you dislike.” To sum it up, these two people are keen to control the conversation so they don’t lose the argument. If you’ve read everything above, you can see why they’d rather accuse me of illegitimate tactics than to accept the cold, hard, high-low-close facts in the stock charts.

What that last paragraph leads up to is this: I watched both commercials. The Nike ad was only controversial because Colin was in it, but the ad itself is not actually a “woke” ad. It’s a typical Nike ad with a positive message that encourages you to get out there and be successful and stand up for yourself. It’s a well-done advertisement that does exactly what a major brand wants: to connect their brand with positive associations in the mind of the viewer. The Gillette ad, on the other hand, was a negative ad that stereotyped not only the entire male gender, but also visibly drew racial divides, with white males as mindless villainous rapists-in-waiting and black males as the only thing keeping them from raping everybody out here. Its “positive message” was nothing more than sprinkles on a racist, sexist, man-hating, race-baiting turd of a commercial that reinforces the premise that men are pieces of trash by default. The Nike ad worked out well for Nike because it was a good ad with a good message. The Gillette ad disproportionately hampered the growth of a company that has 18 other billion-dollar brands they derive value from because it was designed to press all of the controversial sociopolitical agenda buttons that it could.

Why I’ll never build a home in Chatham County, NC

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

I have lived in Siler City, NC (in Chatham County, NC) for four years. Having established a solid commercial presence here and finding the area to be generally decent and agreeable to live in, I’ve been seriously looking into the process of establishing a more permanent residence. However, every time I look up more information regarding the process, I see more reasons to avoid Chatham County for establishing any kind of permanent residence. The reasons are many and varied, but I can chalk the biggest one up to one major factor that causes me more concern than any other. What is this major issue that single-handedly doomed my fantasies of building a home on some undeveloped Chatham County land?

Impact fees.

That’s right, impact fees. Something which I’d never once heard of before I came here. I’ve looked at land in Oxford, NC in the past, as well as various other counties north and northwest of Orange County, and not once have I heard of “impact fees.” What’s an “impact fee” supposed to be for, anyway? Apparently, it’s a one-time county government surcharge (read: “TAX”) that’s supposed to raise money for building or maintaining schools. You know, like elementary, middle, and high schools…for the children I shall never ever produce. And boy, these kids I don’t and won’t have would cost me a ton. How much, you ask?

Chatham County’s impact fee is a one-time fee of $3,500.

Needless to say, I’m not keen on buying a $50,000  parcel of empty land to build my future upon if I have to give Chatham County $3,500 for the privilege of building a house there. Despite being a small business owner (or perhaps because of that), I DO NOT make a large amount of money every month–in fact, I’d say I make the equivalent take-home pay of what someone making $8 an hour would make for the 50+ hours a week I work. Fortunately, I have also gone to some trouble to ensure I live reasonably within my means. I’d love to own instead of rent, but let’s put this into perspective: Chatham County tells me that to start building my dream home here, I have to give them about 9 weeks of my pay just for the “impact fee” privilege, ignoring all other fees such as those required for permits and inspections. The purpose of the impact fee being something that I’ll never see any benefit from is merely an added insult. I don’t want to pay for someone else’s children to go to school, and guess what? I’ll look elsewhere because of the hubris of the fools in charge of Chatham County.

I mean, think about this: if I’m buying land for $50,000 and the county demands $3,500 to “allow me” to build a home, that’s 7% of what I’d have paid for the land! That’s not all there is to it, and I could name off other regressive punishment taxation that chases off development such as the “recreation fee,” but my point is clear.

Chatham County: no one wants to move here because you run things like you’re Chapel Hill, Cary, or Raleigh, but you’re none of these. Chatham is rapidly becoming a “bedroom community” and many businesses are shutting down or moving to neighboring counties that don’t have absurdly brain-dead policies like this. I can’t count how many decent-sized corporations have considered Chatham County, NC as a possible location for some kind of sizable facility that would bring hundreds of jobs to the area, only to be denied something they needed. From what I understand, the old Joan Fabrics building in Siler City (which is now occupied by Acme-McCrary, leaving an empty Acme-McCrary building right across the street) was examined for potential as a distribution center for Sheetz, and that deal fell through because someone in some level of local government didn’t want all that tractor-trailer traffic to be there on US 64. Hello, genius, the building has something like 8-10 loading docks on the side! If you want to fill it, is it really reasonable to expect that those docks will be left mostly unused?

In four years, I have witnessed a slow but steady decline in Chatham County’s economy, and while my business is doing well, it’s more because of adaptation and our ability to engineer workflow and customer experience improvements; the county and city governments largely seem to prefer that businesses shut down and get replaced by trees and pastures. On top of that, fees such as impact and recreation fees that charge a premium for the privilege of developing and growing Chatham County end up reducing overall revenues by strongly encouraging people to build their lives in Burlington, Sanford, and Asheboro instead.

Please, for the love of all that’s sane and logical, get rid of these kinds of fees. They hurt everyone in the entire county, and they’re the biggest reason I’ll never build my permanent home here. I don’t want to live in a bedroom community, and when the lease is up on the current location for my business, I’m going to have to justify remaining in Siler City. A forecast of future economic activity will play very heavily into this choice.

How many people are going through the same thought process about this subject every year? How much opportunity for growth has Chatham flipped the bird towards and lost forever? With the constant growth going on in the county, it will only become more difficult to justify over time.