TL;DR
- Nearly anything can become political in today’s environment
- The era of vanilla statements designed to offend no one is over
- Brands must consistently act in alignment with the values that built them to stay aligned with their core customer
- Brands must also be willing to risk the displeasure of other consumer groups
- The role of the communications leader is now also that of Chief Conscience Officer: to engage in deeper, more ethnographic audience research while serving as the conscience of the organization, keeping its actions in alignment with not just the company’s values but those of its core customer
It was a rough summer for brands. Many made the news, from Astronomer to Cracker Barrel to Target, for all the wrong reasons. But their experience may well be a harbinger of the environment to come for all of us as communicators.
We’ve got to understand multiple shifts in how consumers want and expect brands to behave, how we as communications handle crisis preparation, and the role we must play with our leadership teams.
The New Reality: Everything Is Political
According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer in 2023, almost 60% of consumers said they had stopped buying from a brand due to its stance on a political or social issue.
By 2025, the number of buyers across the political spectrum who said they either choose or avoid brands based on their beliefs had increased to 64%.
That’s not activists or fringe groups; that’s regular, everyday shoppers making purchasing decisions based on whether a company’s actions match their personal values.
What’s more, many consumers are now looking to read corporate motivations and actions through a political lens, even when one isn’t intended, which doesn’t bode well for companies.
We’ve entered an era where the mere act of selling rainbow-colored merchandise, featuring a transgender influencer, supporting the president’s initiatives, or posting about workplace diversity can trigger nationwide boycotts.
Where a casual social media post about sustainability can be labeled “woke” by one segment and “greenwashing” by another.
Where simply changing your logo is instantly, if inaccurately, read as having taken a side in the culture wars.
Where staying silent is no longer neutral – it’s seen as complicity by those demanding brands take a stand.
This isn’t just about hot-button political issues anymore. Customer expectations around corporate behavior have fundamentally shifted. They’re not just buying products; they’re buying into belief systems.
Making things even more complicated, negative views about – and even hostility to – Americans on the other side of the political divide are growing quickly. According to a May 2025 Pew Research study, growing shares of both Republicans and Democrats say members of the other party are more immoral, dishonest, and closed-minded than other Americans.
The Effect On Brands: Forced To Take Sides
Think about what this means for brands: in an era in which consumers look for brands whose behavior and values align with theirs, those same consumers increasingly look with suspicion and hostility toward “the other side.”
The old playbook – the careful, vanilla messaging designed to offend no one while saying very little – has become the riskiest strategy of all. Companies trying to thread the needle between opposing viewpoints often satisfy neither side. They end up looking inauthentic to everyone and being trusted by no one.
I’m not here to tell you which side of the political divide your brand should choose. But I am here to share an uncomfortable truth: In today’s polarized marketplace, trying to please everyone is almost guaranteed to alienate them all instead.
The brands that thrive aren’t the ones avoiding controversy; they’re the ones who know exactly who they serve and why, and have the courage to live those values consistently, even when it might cost them.
And the communications professionals who thrive in this environment aren’t the ones working to keep their brand out of trouble.
They’re the ones who recognize and understand what their brand’s core audience feels and expects from the brands they support – and then guide the organization and its leaders accordingly.
This makes audience research and communications’ role as the audience’s representatives inside an organization all the more important.
Understanding Values-Based Expectations
Gini Dietrich has written about how PR practitioners are becoming the new “visibility engineers,” applying our skills to help ensure that brands are visible in a new reality in which AI searches take the place of clicks. One of the most valuable insights for visibility engineers isn’t just knowing what our audiences are searching AI for, but why.
Traditional audience research often stops at surface-level data: age, income, geography, and purchase behavior.
Visibility engineering requires a deeper understanding of your audience’s values ecosystem – what they expect from brands they support, what triggers their skepticism or mistrust, and how they define authenticity.
Values Mapping, Not Just Sentiment Tracking
Effective audience research for values alignment goes beyond tracking brand sentiment. It requires mapping your audience’s values and priorities – understanding which principles they consider non-negotiable, which they’re willing to see evolve, and which they expect brands to avoid entirely.
This means conducting research that asks:
- What role do they expect your brand to play in social/political conversations?
- When has a brand they trusted disappointed them, and why?
- What would make them feel like this brand “isn’t for you anymore”?
- How do they define authenticity when it comes to corporate values?
Early Warning Systems
Smart visibility engineers build monitoring systems that track not just what their audiences say about their brand but also what they say about competitors who take similar or opposing stances.
They monitor the language patterns, emotional intensity, and staying power of values-based criticism in their specific customer communities.
This way, you can understand what your core audiences care about and expect, anticipate the adverse reactions from other audiences, and counsel appropriately.
In an environment where even logo changes can have unintended political undertones, you have to understand that no brand will be able to please everyone, which positions or statements or actions will resonate with your core audiences – and importantly, what the reaction from other customer groups will be.
This puts communications leaders in a unique position—one that may have been unstated before but now becomes a big part of the job description: chief conscience officer, whose role it is to ensure alignment between a company’s stated values and its actions, as well as alignment with its core customer base’s expectations and employee expectations.
The Authenticity Audit
Smart visibility engineers should regularly conduct “authenticity audits,” asking:
- Do our current actions align with our stated values?
- Are we making decisions based on our actual customer base, or vocal minorities who may not actually even be customers?
- When we face pressure to change positions, are we being asked to abandon core values or just update practices?
- Would this decision make sense to someone who’s supported our brand for years?
The most successful companies in this environment aren’t necessarily the most progressive or conservative; they’re the most consistent.
They know what they stand for, understand their customers, and resist the temptation to seek approval from people who were never going to be loyal supporters anyway.
And that’s what many companies get wrong: they think their problem is taking controversial positions. Their real problem is abandoning the values that built their brand in the first place. And this isn’t an academic discussion; it’s a financial one.
Target’s abandoning of its DEI initiatives cost CEO Brian Cornell his job as sales dropped following its move.
Cracker Barrel lost nearly $100 million in market value due to backlash over its new logo and perceptions of its motivations for change.
Bud Light lost $1.4 billion in beer sales and dropped from the number one brand in the U.S. to number three after backlash to its partnership with a trans influencer.
The Pattern: Three Ways to Lose
These cases reveal three distinct failure types:
- Target: Abandoning stated values under pressure
- Bud Light: Acting inconsistently with brand identity and audience expectations
- Cracker Barrel: Evolving positioning without considering audience alignment
In each case, the companies ended up in no man’s land: they were not trusted by either their traditional base or the new audiences they were trying to reach. They didn’t fail because they took controversial positions; they failed because they took inconsistent ones.
The Communications Professional’s Evolving Role
Professionals must evolve beyond traditional PR and marketing functions in this new landscape. You’re not just managing message distribution but also architecting brand integrity systems. Here are the three critical roles you must master:
Audience Whisperer: Knowing Their “Why”
Demographics tell you who your customers are; ethnography tells you why they choose you.
Visibility engineers don’t just know that their audience is “women aged 25-45 with household incomes over $75K.” They understand the values framework that drives purchase decisions within that audience.
This means going beyond survey data to understand the cultural context of your customer base. What media do they consume? What other brands do they support, and why?
What language do they use when they feel betrayed by a company? What’s their tolerance for brand evolution versus their expectation of consistency?
For Bud Light, for example, this would have meant understanding that their core audience viewed the brand as authentically American and working-class – and that partnerships perceived as corporate virtue signaling would feel like rejection of that identity, regardless of the broader population’s views on LGBTQ+ rights.
Crisis Architect: Anticipating Backlash
Values-based backlash follows predictable patterns, but most companies treat each incident as a unique surprise. Smart communications professionals build response frameworks before they need them.
These aren’t just crisis communication templates; they’re strategic decision trees for values-based controversies. When faced with backlash, do you double down, clarify, or adjust?
The answer depends on whether the criticism comes from your core audience or peripheral groups, whether it challenges stated values or tactical execution, and whether your response would strengthen or weaken trust with your primary customer base.
Target needed frameworks for: “What if our diversity initiatives face conservative backlash?” and “What if scaling back those initiatives faces progressive backlash?”
Having pre-planned responses would have prevented the reactive decision-making that amplified their crisis.
Chief Conscience Officer: Keeping Everybody Honest
Most importantly, communications professionals must become the internal voice asking: “Does this align with who we say we are?”
This means you have to be brave enough to be the person in the room who says, “Wait – if we do this, how do we explain it to customers who supported us specifically because of our previous position?” or “This initiative contradicts what we said last year about our company values.”
Think of yourself as a visible “Jiminy Cricket,” the voice of an internal conscience that advises leadership on how to stay consistently within the brand’s value lines.
You’re not just managing external perceptions; you’re helping leadership understand the long-term reputational costs of inconsistency.
Sometimes that means advocating for staying the course despite short-term pressure. Sometimes it means helping the organization recognize when their stated values have genuinely evolved and need to be updated transparently.
Importantly, the “Chief Conscience Officer” is not about imposing your personal values on the organization; it’s about ensuring the organization’s actions can be credibly defended against the values they’ve publicly embraced.
The Strategy: Authentic Alignment Over Universal Appeal
Moving from crisis response to proactive strategy means building systems that prevent values misalignment before it becomes a PR disaster. Here’s how visibility engineers can create sustainable brand integrity:
Mapping the Values Landscape
Start by creating a values map that plots company stated values against actual customer values. This isn’t a one-time thing; it’s an ongoing audit that tracks how both evolve over time.
Document your company’s public commitments: mission statements, CEO speeches, marketing campaigns, corporate social responsibility reports, and employee communications. Then map these against research showing what your core customers value, prioritize, and expect from brands like yours.
Look for gaps. If your company talks about innovation but your customers value tradition, that tension point needs strategic attention. If your audience expects environmental leadership but your company focuses primarily on other values, that’s either an opportunity or a potential blind spot.
The Evolution Decision Matrix
Not all values will be created equal. Sometimes change represents authentic organizational growth; sometimes it’s reactive pandering. Here’s how you can look at it.
Evolve when:
- Your customer base is genuinely changing and bringing new values expectations
- Your stated values were never authentic to your actual business practices
- You can tell a credible story about why and how your thinking has developed
- The evolution strengthens rather than weakens your differentiation
Stay the course when:
- Pressure comes primarily from non-customers or vocal minorities
- The change would contradict core values that define your brand identity
- Evolution would damage trust with loyal customers who chose you for specific reasons
- The shift feels reactive rather than purposeful
Building Values Resilience
The strongest brands don’t just react to values-based pressure; they build resilience into their communications infrastructure. This means: creating clear internal guidelines about which values are non-negotiable versus which can evolve.
Patagonia, for example, has never wavered on environmental activism because it’s a core part of its brand, but it has evolved its specific policy positions as science and circumstances change.
Values resilience also calls for developing transparent communication about values evolution. When companies need to update their positions, they explain their thinking, acknowledge the change, and help stakeholders understand the decision process rather than pretending nothing has shifted.
Finally, it requires building coalitions before you need them. The brands that weather values-based storms best are those that have cultivated relationships with customers, employees, and stakeholders who understand and support the company’s authentic position.
The Payoff: Sustainable Differentiation
Companies that master authentic values alignment don’t just survive controversy; they build deeper customer loyalty. Their audiences become advocates rather than just consumers, defending the brand during difficult moments because they understand and believe in what the company represents.
In an era where everything is political, the communications professionals who thrive won’t be those who help their companies avoid taking positions or avoid offending anyone.
They’ll be the ones who help their companies take authentic, consistent positions that strengthen rather than dilute their brand identity, and then communicate those positions with clarity, courage, and strategic intelligence.
Spin Sucks Can Help
In my next few articles, I’ll explore how the PESO Model© specifically facilitates the role of chief conscience officer and helps you build values resiliency into your communications strategy.
If you want help building values-resilient communications and defining your brand’s values, we’re ready. Email me directly or reach out through Spin Sucks. Let’s create something brave.
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