The Rise of the Partisan Brand

This last Super Bowl was remarkable on how overtly politicized the ads were, along with the absence of ads objectifying women as sex objects. From Nordstrom to LL Bean to Hobby to Anheuser-Bush, brands are taking a political stance.

In the past, companies have taken the high road, citing fiduciary responsibility as being the primary north star, with partisanship being a bad strategy for growth. But, with customers increasingly demanding brands have a political stance, and voting with their wallets, even reluctant brands like Uber are forced to take action.

In some ways, this is the inevitable consequence of purpose-based brands.

For holding companies, the long-term strategy of political agnosticism, is increasingly problematic. The cracks in the strategy were already apparent when companies like Unilever simultaneously pushed the agendas of Dove and Axe. The hypocrisy and the refusal to take a stand was manageable in the past by creating distance between brands and the ownership structure but this line of argument is no longer being accepted by consumers.

With a few exceptions, brands are able to follow along political faults because, other than the largest LCD brands like United Airlines, the brands’ user groups are subject to the same forces of self-selection that the entire population feels. Thus the core Cabela’s user is distinct demographically, politically, and psychologically, from the core Theory customer.

But the fissures of division during the Super Bowl were a bit surprising. Perhaps this was Budweiser being tone deaf to its user base. The 2016 Amy Schumer/Seth Rogen spot also did not resonate with consumers, leading to a drop in sales.

When everything is tinged with political meaning, whether intentional or not, brands like Budweiser now risk alienating a core segment of their user base when they are dialectically opposed to the political ideology of their consumers. I wonder, what role do brands have in driving ideological change?

Can brands remain agnostic?

When the audiences themselves are so partisan, when the user demands you take a position, officers are left with a new reality where the brand must respond. Uber discovered that many users were willing to leave the franchise if the brand did not behave according to their political expectations.

Is this a new phenomena?

Over the past number of years, at least, the growth of the B-Corp with the concurrent rise of social entrepreneurialism as a movement has shown that for many brands and companies, being purpose driven from the onset means good business. Here, the metrics of success are not only defined by growth or profitability but by whatever the B-Corp has delineated as the primary goals. Patagonia is but one example of a company that has operationalized the purpose-driven nature of the company in such a a way that offices are not torn between fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders and being aligned with the brand.

But Anheuser-Busch is not a B-Corp. Nor is it a private company like Hobby Lobby. Do the shareholders and officers who have fiduciary duty see eye-to-eye when the company takes a political stance at the cost of alienating large segments? Or is the reality that no brand can successfully maintain a common platform across our increasingly culturally divided country. So a 50% market share represents the entire available market. Given that we live in a country where the corporation is perhaps the most important organizing principle of our lives, how do they navigate partisanship?