HAVING initially denounced the sugar tax, last year AG Barr, maker of Scotland’s favourite sugary drink, changed their tune, becoming poster boys for all things healthy by cutting the sugar in Irn Bru by half. This was sold as something the public wanted, rather than as part of the finger wagging approach that has been pushed down people’s throats since Tony Blair’s New Labour invented the politics of behaviour.

Giving people what they are supposed to want rather than what they actually want has upset many consumers of Irn Bru. The company has also not had its troubles to seek: revenue and profits are down.

Despite, what must be a collective quivering of lips amongst AG Barr’s decision makers, they are holding the line that their decision was the right one. But wait a moment. Magically, it appears that the original recipe for the drink, that contains even more sugar than the one taken off the market last year, has been discovered and Irn Bru 1901 is to hit the shelves in December. It’s a “limited edition” but it will be interesting to see just how limited it becomes.

Behavioural correctness has also had an impact on Gillette, famed for their “The best a man can get” razors, following their toxic masculinity advert. The ad depicts men and boys bullying one another and sexually harassing women with a line of robotic men chanting “Boys will be boys”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, although clearly to the surprise of Gillette’s advertising gurus, men haven’t taken kindly to being depicted as bullies and abusers.

Sales of Gillette razors have been falling for a number of years as new cheaper razors hit the market but this advert hasn’t helped. The YouGov BrandIndex buzz score, that assesses positive and negative comments about brands, found the brand was suddenly on the slide, so much so that it slipped from seventh in the list of health and beauty brands to bottom. Similarly, comments on Youtube were overwhelming negative with a negative to positive ratio of ten to one.

Market analysts have even compiled a cognitive response chart that found the regular use of terms like “disgusting” and “contempt”. This is an understandable response – after all, since when did boys being boys mean that you thought sexual harassment was acceptable, or that part of being a man was to beat up other people?

It turns out that being treated like a naughty child who needs to be told how to act or what to eat and drink isn’t all that appealing. Unlike the old Irn Bru that was sweet and sugary, which was why people liked it, its puritanical replacement appears to be leaving a bad taste in the mouth.