When cats get too much of their fur, they get sick and cough it up.

The present corporate obsession with being ‘woke’ and pandering to the LGBT community strikes us as a little like a corporate hairball: the companies all spent too much time preening themselves, at the expense of their main markets, only to get sickened by their customers who punished their stock values for being so narrow minded.

Parenthetically, we think that being ‘woke’, in the sense of being aware of your markets, is probably a good thing, but the term has gotten a bad rap, so it has to be avoided. We’re sure that the adpersons can think of a suitable replacement.

We hope that our main readership in the SMB community didn’t commit such silly mistakes. We don’t know why the big companies did, and why their CEOs didn’t apologize, but they didn’t.

We had a client years ago, Taser, who makes the stun instruments, and when the devices first came out, they weren’t nearly as good as they are now, and were roundly misused by their major market, the law enforcement community. Taser got severe adverse publicity from the general public, even though the misuse wasn’t really their fault.

The owners and managers of Taser didn’t want to believe that their client base could be so stupid as to misuse their product, and it took some persuading to get them to apologize to the public, but they did, and did a lot of public relations (which is where we came in) with their customers. But a better product emerged from the chaos, so that was good.

We hope that the managements of Bud Light, Target and the others who committed these corporate faux pas have learned from their mistakes.