49 comments

[ 0.93 ms ] story [ 86.4 ms ] thread
That's actually pretty representative of the people I see drinking Monster drinks.
>"Monster Green shoppers are likely younger (Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X) male, lower income & Caucasian (skews Hispanic)."

What does this sentence even mean?

Looks quite a lot like an esports team!
What a bizarre reaction to a completely standard marketing segment. Who does the author THINK is Monster Energy Drink's core customer?
I don't get why a normal corporate internal resource system its being framed as ridiculous. Does the writer not know about "personas"? Weird tone.
Reading this article feels like seeing somebody you don't particularly like get pantsed, but feeling bad for them because the person pantsing them is an even bigger idiot. Like Monster is not in tech. In any regard. I'm sure that they contract for 100% of their development.
This is what happens when you contract out your development. Huge companies are going to FAFO as they continue to do pursue this foolishness.
A lot of pearl clutching over extremely average marketing material.
Not me. Their "Core Brand Family Consumer". And I have no reason to believe it is inaccurate.
I found this actually to be very cute. It’s awesome that their employees have gamified badges and that the photo of their core customer looks so awesome.
You will never guess what i did when i read the headline!
This feels a bit over the line from disclosure to sharing corporate documents… feels a lil bit crimey
disclosure is also a crime, but anyway
You can tell this guy has never worked or interacted with corporate marketing or advertising in any way because their astonishment at identifying their main market segment is standard practice literally everywhere. Lmao.

Focus on the security issues sure, but maybe think a bit more critically about how businesses function.

Go look around at who you see drinking monster and you're probably going to see they're not at all wrong.

This is a customer avatar. It’s standard marketing theory. And likely know who their customers are.
I would have loved a breakdown of what group each variant of Monster is being marketed to !
For whatever it’s worth, they do have a job opening posted on LinkedIn for a sysadmin whose duties would include resolving that file access issue. Not my cup of tea as far as employers go (I don’t like energy drinks) but it seemed apropos to mention under the circumstances :)
I dont actually look like the people from the photos but yes I do imagine this is how I would look like on the rare occasion I decide to get Monster drink lol
My guess of what the author of this blog post looks like is 15-19yrs old & male, probably aspie.

Also should probably be a little more careful with risking the CFAA, but they seem really young so I'm guessing that's the main explanation.

(comment deleted)
This is a strange disclosure post.

They may not have had a security email but I’m sure there was some contact this could have been sent to before posting something like this.

Part of me wonders if OP even tried or was mostly just looking to dunk on a company.

I wonder what form of beveraged stimulant the author was on?
It is highly irresponsible to disclose security vulnerabilities publicly, and in some jurisdictions it may even be illegal.

While I understand that the author attempted to contact Monster without receiving a response, publishing details of the vulnerabilities and how to exploit them only puts users at greater risk. This approach is reckless and harmful.

Didn't Mike Wazowski and James P. "Sulley" Sullivan go to MU?
Funny, but these are the kinds of things they will gladly tell you on any earnings conference call (and more!)
Their characterization of their customer base mostly rings true to me. My white teenage kids love the stuff.

Don't know about GenX though. A common definition of GenX is born between 1965 and 1980. Speaking for all GenX males of the world, the stuff tastes overly sweet to me and don't want to risk a higher A1C on carbonated sugar water. Bleh!

There might be a bit of history involved. I'm GenX - very early GenX, at that. I discovered Monster in 2002 IIRC, back when energy drinks really started to take off. (Red Bull is the only one I remember seeing much before that, unless you also count Jolt, and even then it was nowhere near the pervasive thing it has become today.) I tried everything I could find, and Monster was the only one that didn't taste like absolute crap. I think the siberian ginseng is the key BTW, to complement caffeine's characteristic flavor.

So, back then, most consumers would have been GenX. Millennials would have been between 6yo and 21yo with only the very oldest likely to be buying such things. GenZ wasn't part of any market segment, and Alpha didn't even exist yet. Some of us GenXers stuck with it; at 60yo I still drink a can instead of coffee every day and none of my labs show any ill effects. Maybe we're not the primary demographic any more, but we're certainly still in there.

So ... which of us speaks for all GenX males in the world? ;)

Uh okay? A drink company thinks their customers look like normal people? So what?