The Big Tent is Burning Down
The impulse for consumer brands to avoid politics seems increasingly like wishful thinking
By Rob Walker
[This essay was originally published in Institute for the Future’s annual journal FUTURE NOW in the fall of 2018. Since that time, other consumer brands (most notably, Gillette with its #TheBestMenCanBe effort) have started to realize that taking a stand on a divisive issue is sometimes a better choice than remaining silent.]
Candidates for elective office seem increasingly obsessed with pandering to an extreme voter base and capitulating to one form or another of litmus-test loyalty. Mass-oriented brands, in contrast, strive for what politicians (used to?) call “big tent” appeal: They welcome, by and large, anyone who is ready to buy whatever it is they’re peddling. The big-tent brand remains strictly apolitical, floating above blunt partisanship.
Or at least that’s how it’s been through most of the history of capitalism. But by the time people started uploading videos of themselves destroying their fancy coffee machines as an act of ideological expression last year, something had clearly changed.
That episode, actually, neatly summarizes the ways that Trump-era polarization, supercharged by social media and a hothouse news environment, forces brands into our volatile political discourse whether they want to be there or not.
It started when the arch-conservative Fox News and syndicated radio host Sean Hannity seemed to defend Roy Moore, a wildly controversial Republican candidate for an Alabama Senate seat who had been accused of groping under-age girls. Left-leaning watchdog Media Matters responded by attacking not just Hannity, but various companies that bought ad time on his show. A number of advertisers pulled out. One was Keurig, the maker of a popular pod-based coffee maker.
All of which is pretty much in line with how these scenarios have played out for decades: brands don’t exactly take sides, they just avoid controversy, and quietly slink away if they sense a political flashpoint might singe them. Keurig is obviously a big-tent brand, not looking to have any stake in an Alabama senate race, or partisan politics generally.
But then Hannity fans responded to this backlash with their own backlash. They singled out Keurig, first by way of a #boycottkeurig campaign. In the age of “hit back 10 times harder,” that seemed pretty tepid. So people starting inflicting violence on the actual appliance — beating it to pieces with a hammer, throwing it off a balcony — and sharing the results online. The mainstream press dutifully amplified these stunts, and the politicization of Keurig was complete. “I am humbled and speechless and frankly laughing my ass off,” Hannity tweeted. “I love all my deplorable friends.”
Possibly this weaponization of shopping decisions seems ridiculous. But the pieces have been in place for a while. Political operatives have long recognized certain affinities between certain consumer preferences and voting patterns, and include such data in their demographic profile-driven campaign targeting. Likewise, the boycott is a venerable protest tactic. Moreover, activists have jujitsu-ed brand power at least since the era of pressuring Coca Cola and others to divest from apartheid-era South Africa.
What’s changed has much to do with technology — but not just in the obvious ways that social media, for instance, has given everybody a personalized megaphone and a precisely defined echo chamber. The reckless, sloppy, out-of-control practice of “programmatic” advertising provided a crucial opening. A supposedly hyper-efficient method of matching branded messages to ideal audiences across more online platforms than any human media buyer could ever manage, programmatic networks seem like a great tool for a big-tent advertiser. But it turns out they can also deliver ads into decidedly divisive environments.
When a pizza chain finds itself needing to denounce the support of neo-Nazis, the brand is in trouble.
The founders of the anonymous Twitter account Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) figured this out and launched a campaign that has caused thousands of brands, large and small, to withdraw ad messages from the alt-right Brietbart.com. At first, one of the founders later explained, he was simply dumbfounded that mainstream and even relatively progressive brands would advertise on such a controversial site. And as Sleeping Giants and a growing army of followers began to bum rush those brands on Twitter, many seemed equally surprised — they had no idea what their programmatic algorithms had decided.
Breitbart tried its own backlash-to-the-backlash, calling on its readers to boycott and sign a related petition condemning cereal giant Kellogg after it pulled out of the site. The site also began publishing smashmouth broadsides about the company, attempting to make having a position on the politics of Special K another front in the culture wars.
That didn’t really work. But it points to a second characteristic of our age that has politicized consumer brands: the frequency of spiteful escalation. Our political culture increasingly focuses on exploiting and creating divisions, and compromise is not much in the air. They go low — we stomp them. Probably social media contributes to this phenomenon, not just because of the way it siloes us into communities of like-minded belief, but because it makes it so easy to reach and attack one another. If you’re going to connect, it has to be with an uppercut.
The fallout can be unpredictable. When some NFL players began to take a knee during the national anthem to bring attention to police violence against African Americans, for instance, nobody predicted this would ultimately have consequences for the Papa John’s pizza chain.
But President Donald harshly criticized the protesting players, and the National Football League in general, ignoring the underlying motivation for the protests and replacing it with a kind of nationwide referendum on patriotism. Working the commercial angle, he also blamed the players for hurting NFL ratings. As the controversy ramped up, that last point was echoed, weirdly, by John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s: in a conference call with investors, he stated that fewer people were watching football, and thus seeing his company’s ads, which was hurting sales.
In a moment of unexpected connection, Papa John’s was promptly endorsed by The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website. The company backpedaled furiously, but when a pizza chain finds itself needing to denounce the support of neo-Nazis, the brand is in trouble. Papa John himself, CEO John Schnatter, resigned.
It’s no wonder that despite the sizable media audiences the president constantly attracts, 76 percent of surveyed brands “explicitly avoid advertising next to Trump-related content,” according to research from the marketing publication Digiday.
That’s a traditional, controversy-averse, big-tent brand stance. But the impulse to avoid politics altogether seems increasingly like wishful thinking. And while Digiday reports that just 16 percent of the brands it canvassed believe it’s in their interest to “wade into political commentary,” there’s some evidence of one last shift in the consumption and ideology zeitgeist. Some striking, if anecdotal, examples show brands taking remarkably direct and proactive decisions with unmistakable political implications.
A few relatively mainstream brands have always had associations with a distinct ideological worldview — Patagonia, for instance, builds environmental progressivism into its identity; Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby openly embrace conservative religious values; and so on. Some are amplifying such messages, testing the idea that taking a political stance means touching the third rail of branding. The founder of a Wisconsin company called Penzeys Spices lost some customers, but ultimately saw sales spike, after an email to customers slammed “the open embrace of racism by the Republican Party.” Yogurt maker Chobani has made it a point to hire refugee immigrants, defying conservative media critics. Patagonia actually sued the president in an effort to reverse the shrinking of the Bear Ears national monument.
But the most intriguing examples involve brands making concrete decisions with political implications that may seem unexpected or even counterintuitive. In the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida school massacre, the decidedly big-tent retailer Wal Mart banned firearm sales to customers under age 21. Dick’s Sporting Goods did the same, and not only decided to stop selling AR-15-style rifles, but destroyed its existing stock. A slew of mainstream companies — from Hertz to Metlife to United Airlines — severed ties to the National Rifle Association, ending various promotional partnerships.
Those decisions didn’t come out of nowhere. They followed the now-familiar blizzard of social media complaints, combined with the startlingly savvy and effective activism of Parkland students. It was, perhaps, an extreme case, but maybe it points to the future. When partisan flashpoints emerge, more brands realize that they will simply have to take a stand, whether they want to or not. The worst political move may now be to pretend to be above politics.
And the second worst political move might be to hem and haw and hesitate. The metabolism of public discourse has obviously accelerated. You can see it in the #metoo movement, which has toppled stars in entertainment and the media and other fields with breathtaking swiftness. You could see it in the speed with which ABC pulled the plug on its ratings-gold Roseanne reboot mere hours after a blatantly racist tweet from creator/star Roseanne Barr. And you could see it in how quickly Starbucks responded to the embarrassing mistreatment of black customers in one of its outlets with a showy nationwide sensitivity-training effort. Commerce, of course, figures prominently in all these decisions, and their velocity: networks don’t wait around to see if an advertiser rebellion emerges, and mainstream-focused businesses don’t hang back to see if a damaging boycott really happens. They act.
What’s most fascinating about this is how companies’ ties to the bottom-line world of the real marketplace may result in decisions that differ from those of politicians forever pandering to the base. All those corporations that walked away from the N.R.A. seem to be surviving that supposedly controversial decision quite nicely. How many N.R.A.-embracing politicians could do the same? Maybe brands will end up having something useful to contribute to our chaotic marketplace of ideas.
Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, business, the arts, and other subjects. He has contributed to The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, TheNewYorker.Com, Design Observer, The Organist, and many others. His book The Art of Noticing (Knopf) comes out in May 2019. He is on the faculty of the Products of Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts.
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