In Defense of Corporate Parochialism
Victoria Secret's return to sexiness
Victoria’s Secret announced this week that they are returning to “sexiness.” In recent years, the company attempted to rebrand itself as “inclusive,” promoting fat, gay, trans, and mentally disabled models. In 2021, The New York Times covered its alleged shift away from a “misogynistic corporate culture that trafficked in sexism, sizeism and ageism.” Megan Rapinoe, a visibly lesbian soccer player the company hired to model its lingerie, told the Times that Victoria’s Secret was “patriarchal, sexist, viewing not just what it meant to be sexy but what the clothes were trying to accomplish through a male lens and through what men desired.” The rebrand cost the company millions of dollars in revenue. So, now it’s returning to an allegedly outdated vision of sexiness dominated by straight, fit, and curvy women who don’t have Down syndrome.
I’ve been working through a Google course on user experience and design. In a module about design principles, a Google employee described the “curb-cut effect.” A curb is cut when part of it is formed into a ramp so that disabled people have easier access to the sidewalk. The effect states that product changes that increase accessibility for one demographic group benefit the entire user base. Everyone could use a good ramp! The curb-cut effect applies to product design, but large corporations have been acting as though it directly transfers to marketing. The problem is that these business processes differ in a key way. A marketing campaign always promotes a cultural definition of the product, but a product design change can occur without necessarily impacting how the product is culturally understood by the market.
Take for example a streaming service that adds the ability to view content with subtitles to their platform. This increases accessibility for the hearing impaired, but it benefits customers who aren’t hard of hearing as well. They can turn the subtitles on to understand what a character is saying when the audio is mixed poorly. I can hear fine, but I can’t understand a lot of the dialogue in the movie Tenet without subtitles because the characters’ voices are drowned out by the music and sound effects. Adding subtitles is a product change with a powerful curb-cut effect.
Now, imagine if the company chose to highlight this feature in their marketing materials, touting their product as “a streaming service for the deaf.” Since most people aren’t hearing impaired, this framing wouldn’t convert many potential customers into paying subscribers. In fact, it would likely hurt sales. The improvement in product design doesn’t work as an effective foundation for a marketing campaign because most of the market cares more about high-quality content than hearing accessibility.
Big companies have been changing their marketing strategies in this misguided way. They frame their products as “diverse” and “inclusive” under the apparent belief that this messaging will increase conversion. Ideological bias clouds their judgment. Many corporate leaders are liberals who want everyone to care more about equalizing social inequalities than pursuing their personal desires. They privilege universalism over parochialism in their political and business decisions.
Recent corporate scandals and branding reversals have revealed the flaws in this approach. It turns out that Bud Light customers don’t want to drink trans beer, Target moms are offended by gender-bending children’s clothes, and young female lingerie shoppers don’t find ugly lesbians particularly erotic. The desired curb-cut effect in marketing fails to replicate because demographic groups have conflicting desires and campaigns for “inclusivity” inevitably prioritize minority groups over majority ones. In corporate settings, terms like “diverse” and “inclusive” mean “minority affirming,” which is the positive way of saying “majority negating.”
Good branding is univocal, it sends a consistent and clear message about product value. If the messaging is tailored specifically to minority groups, then the majority of customers will be alienated and profits jeopardized. Too-big-to-fail companies run “inclusivity” campaigns because their liberal leadership is religiously committed to universalism, not because it’s good for business. The economic downturn is exposing this fact as companies like Victoria’s Secret re-implement marketing strategies that actually appeal to the majority of their target markets.
Parochialism, narrow-minded focus on a specific subset of a wider population, is demonized by corporate liberals despite its clear advantages. It sins against universalism by appealing to the majority and spending less time and effort focusing on minority market segments, thereby reinforcing existing social inequalities in the overall market. There is no profitable alternative to this in a capitalist economy with free competition. The more marketing affirms the minority, the less it targets the majority, and the more the company stands to lose to competitors who are willing to (heinously) capitalize on the desires of the majority.
I hope unapologetic parochialism is making a powerful cultural comeback. The diehard promotion of universalism, in products, branding, media, etc., obfuscates and diminishes the value of products by trying to make everything be for everyone. Retarded lingerie may give liberal women a warm “inclusive” feeling, but it probably won’t make them feel sexy.
The Times piece I mentioned at the top ends with a vengeful statement from Rapinoe. “I don’t know if Victoria has a secret anymore.” She was obviously happy about this because she resents beauty’s parochialism, how it’s unequally distributed across the population. Victoria’s secret is that she’s hotter than you. It’s about time she remembered to keep her secret and that American culture remembered a secret of nature, economy, and marketing: Nothing special is for everyone.
