Despite a long, unbroken string of abject failures for the so-called woke approach to attracting customers, it seems that the corporate elites cannot help themselves. They must cram woke themes into areas of marketing and corporate strategy where they were never meant to go.

The election of the decidedly anti-woke President Trump, a series of customer revolts, and another string of financial disasters in 2024, might fray the confidence highly paid company executives have when it comes to using transgender issues, diversity, inclusion, equity and most other parts of the modern, progressive agenda in products and marketing. But not at all, their confidence has proved extraordinarily persistent.

As this is being written, the Australian Securities Exchange and investor groups have managed to convince themselves that company boards should be forced to disclose information on the sexual orientation, ethnicity and disabilities of directors in order to ‘better inform’ shareholders, as if shareholders had any interest in what their companies do, beyond paying dividends twice a year and maintaining a healthy stock price, let alone the ethnic composition of the board. That debate is ongoing.

Far more puzzling is the intrusion of woke themes into an industry where political incorrectness rules, that of computer games. The result has been a string of massive flops – a first-person co-operative shooter from Sony Entertainment entitled Concord; the action-adventure Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (using characters in the 2016 film Suicide Squad) from producer Rocksteady and the action-adventure Dustborn, developed by Red Threat Games. Suicide Squad included a lesbian race-swapped version of Batman nemesis Mister Freeze, while Concord featured a host of DEI characters with pronouns displayed in one corner. However, the biggest flop was arguably Dustborn, which allowed players to call those they dealt with in-game ‘racist’ or to cancel them.

Commentators have pointed out that the games seem to be made for radical lefties, instead of players who might actually buy them, and each one is thought to have lost perhaps $US200 million ($A318 million), or about the going cost for developing a major game. In sharp contrast to these failures the Chinese-developed Black Myth: Wukong sold 10 million copies in only three days on its release in August 2024. The game features characters and items from Chinese legends, as enemies, companions or accessories. This means the players have fun fighting gruesome monsters and don’t get lectured about diversity and inclusion.

For players delight in being evil in such games, calling in napalm strikes on innocent villages at the slightest show of resistance, nuking New York just to see what the graphics are like (as this writer has done), or massacring the populations of European provinces in medieval times to make way for the up and coming religion of Christianity (I’ve done that, too). Who cares? It’s just a game.

At least Sony acknowledged the market’s verdict on Concord by shutting the game down, refunding the purchase price to all customers and closing the development studios it owned. Not so the other developers or the iconic British luxury car brand Jaguar, which late last year released an ad featuring sexually fluid and diverse characters in bizarre costumes, spouting slogans such as ‘break moulds’ and ‘delete the ordinary’ but without showing any cars at all. To make matters worse, the company has ditched its classic hood ornament and emblem of a leaping jaguar in favour of a prettied-up version of the word ‘Jaguar’.

After a huge backlash which included a spoof version of the ad where the transgender characters were attacked by a Jaguar, company managing director Rawdon Glover declared that he was upset by ‘the level of vile hatred and intolerance’ towards the individuals who appeared in the video.

Now owned by the Indian automotive group Tata Motors, Jaguar wants to expand its customer base to overcome financial difficulties. But woke ads seem to be more likely to alienate the company’s existing, mostly conservative customer base than attract new buyers for a range of yet to be announced range of expensive cars.

Dubbed ‘luxury beliefs’ by author Rob Hendeson, as they signal status in the same way that wine collections or flash apartments in prime locations are able to do, the bizarre application of woke beliefs has even spread to Britain’s iconic science fiction series Dr Who. The 2024 Christmas special, a fixture of the holidays, featured a gay, black doctor (actor Ncuti Gatwa as the fifteenth incarnation of the time traveler), alongside Nicola Coughlan as one-off companion Joy.

Coughlan, in particular, is a puzzling choice for a series that caters mainly to adolescent boys. In sharp contrast to the beauteous Jenna-Lousie Coleman (twelfth doctor), and the pretty, feisty Karen Gillan (eleventh doctor), Coughlan can be described as plus-sized. The Christmas special was further handicapped by a convoluted plot that featured a tedious romance between the gay doctor and a hotel employee. The show pulled in more than five million viewers which sounds impressive but is half the audience of previous, comparable specials.

One company with even less excuse for losing sight of its audience is Disney with a case in point being the ongoing nightmare of the live-action remake of the company’s 1938 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The original film was a big gamble for company founder Walt Disney, represented a huge leap forward for animation and, on the insistence of Disney himself, kept all the elements of the original fairy tale.

Although yet to be released, one of the trailers for Snow White (the dwarfs don’t get billing this time) has earned the highest dislike-to-like ratios ever on YouTube, in part over the computer graphics for the dwarfs, who are mostly not dwarfs but are racially diverse. Meanwhile star Rachel Zegler has alienated fans by dismissing the beloved original as ‘outdated and irrelevant’, and announcing that the central love story could be eliminated from the film, among other things. Now mired in reshoots, the much delayed film is scheduled for release in March 2025.

On the other side of the coin, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been vilified and cancelled by the transgender crowd for her views, only for sales of her books to continue to increase, 28 years after the first Harry Potter book hit the bookstores. A computer game based on the books Hogwarts Legacy proved to be a huge hit, with fans ignoring an attempt by transgender activists to organise a boycott.

Despite these evident proofs that to go woke is indeed to go broke, zealots are still trying to convince others that consumers are interested in such concepts. Bizarrely, corporate executives who should know better are still listening.