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Comment by drc500free | Hacker News Reader

What a bizarre reaction to a completely standard marketing segment. Who does the author THINK is Monster Energy Drink's core customer?

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This is from the post:

> "Monster Green shoppers are likely younger (Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X) male, lower income & Caucasian (skews Hispanic)."

Later in the post:

> The scariest part wasn't the training portal or the questionable customer profiling.

Questionable customer profiling is just basic research about their customers.

Seriously, I wish more companies were honest at least internally who their customers are. A lot of problems could be solved if places like Marvel realized who their core base is, accepted it, and made products for their audience.

Basic understanding of a customer base could've avoided the BudLight fiasco too. Then again, I'm sure if you're an elite upper-middle-class executive from an Ivy League school the idea that you need to cater to lower class working men must be a bit rankling.

I could imagine similar subcurrents for Marvel executives wanting to appear sophisticated or avant garde but instead having to cater to "comic book nerds" must be challenging.

The post has similar undertones of elitism as well. After all most of us tech people skew towards similar habits as does probably most well paid white collar professions.

Good marketers know who their core audiences are. Bad executives will ignore the research.

Watching Warner Brothers fail to learn this lesson for a decade before finally releasing a good Superman movie was frankly a little sureal.

Marvel knows pretty well who their audience is. The problem is Disney trying to tap into emerging markets, because the stereotypical audience is pretty much saturated. Like, there is zero need to market an Avengers movie to white male comic nerds.

It was never saturated. The peak was probably Thanos. Everything since then has been pandering to a more female driven potential audience that was never there.

It's not just female super heroes, which always existed and were popular to some degree (Buffy, Lara Croft, Zena, etc). It was a particular form of shallow female empowerment where the female characters were perfect, or if there was any growth to be had, it was realizing that they were perfect all along and the world just needed to change.

Take for instance She Hulk series, within minutes of gaining her powers, she was able to outperform Hulk. There was no personal growth. Whereas male superheroes typically had to overcome obstacles. Spiderman had to learn with great power comes great responsibility. Batman has to constantly battle with his grief and moral code. Ironman fought substance abuse and his philandering selfish nature. What was the story arch of Captain Marvel? It's just not good story telling

Thanos/Endgame was peak stereotype viewer saturation. I highly doubt they could have increased the viewership again without tapping into new markets.

Marvel's movie business was, for decades, run by the toy business in New York.[1] The movies were optimized for selling the merch. The Hollywood end finally broke free of the New York based "Creative Committee" once film revenue became large enough. The core base for merch is young boys, and that shaped the films.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264987-mcu

So now they sell less merch and their movies and TV shows gross a lot less. So who does this benefit?

Thanks for calling gen-x young.

That made me laugh when I read it, too.

He used his "advanced hacking knowledge" to trick himself into participating in corporate training exercises and tear-inducing boredom. This actually made me laugh.

I’d love if he tricked himself into bulk buying monster and promoting it to all his friends to prove how wrong their target demographic was.

The picture is a little silly but listing out the demographics of your customer base is like so normal. The marketing for Monster would be quite different if their market was over 65 women.

Although it would be a funny bit to run a monster commercial in the style of something like L'Oreal.

You don't have to imagine. For some reason beyond my ken, monster energy has achieved meme status in queer circles.

I was half-surprised one of the pictured people wasn't wearing pink headphones with attached cat ears.

So strange, does the author think companies never try to understand their customers?

When do companies ever try to understand their customers? They know what works for who, and continue to rehash that for that specific age of the generation.

The article even states this. "Monster Green shoppers are likely younger (Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X) male, lower income & Caucasian (skews Hispanic)."

When you've moved from that generational age, your no longer their audience and they don't care if you buy or not; but it's not like they cared in the first place.

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