Should Brands Stay Out Of The Culture Wars?

What a consumer survey of 1,000 Americans tells us

Why I ran yet another study on this frequently studied topic.

The last few years have seen an unparalleled increase in brands and corporations taking stances on social issues on everything from sustainability to global conflicts. The proponents of this approach have often cited research and articles with headlines like this one from Forbes in 2020 below:

"Global Study Reveals Consumers Are Four To Six Times More Likely To Purchase, Protect And Champion Purpose-Driven Companies"

These articles and studies are at best overly-simplistic and at worst misleading and/or misrepresented by journalists and consultants.

Now, you could argue that Purpose-Driven is different than social stances, but the line gets blurred so often that one is often used to defend the other. That discussion is a digression from the main purpose of this study or article, so just bear with me and we can debate that another time :).

After all, who wouldn't agree that they would be more likely to buy products from companies that promote the "Fair treatment of all employees" or have a "Strong set of values".

Here's a dirty little secret from the world of consumer insights: People like to answer questions in the way they think they should.

• For instance, if I ask consumers if they prefer sustainable products they will overwhelmingly agree.
• If you ask them if they will pay a premium for those products, guess what? Still overwhelmingly 'yes'.
• However, if we explore the trade-offs of those price premiums versus other products that don't make a sustainability claim, that premium can only be so large before price wins.

That's why methodology, context and nuance matter when conducting and interpreting research results.

Knowing this, I decided I wanted some real and relevant answers to one of the biggest questions facing CEOs and CMOs these days:

Should our brand take a stance on this issue?

I used our ResTech platform Upsiide to conduct a study in December 2023 of 1,000 Americans aged 18+. Quotas were set to mirror the general population for age, gender and region.

The purpose of this study was to understand the impact on brands of taking a stance on social issues.

Which leads me to my first frustration with much of the research on this topic. Much of the research done on CSR/ESG/Purpose Driven Marketing assumes that you can take a stance that aligns with everyone's 'values' as though there is a universal set of values that everyone agrees with and that those values extend across the incredible breadth of social issues our societies are dealing with these days.

So before we can even consider what it means to 'align with customer values' we need a proxy for what those values are. A deep-dive into values was beyond the scope of this study and also fraught with issues related to bias and politics, so instead I asked a very simple question:

I understand that people within this spectrum may still have different viewpoints on a number of social issues, but I judged that given the political polarization we have seen over the last few years, this simple question makes this an extremely efficient way to filter this study. Further, this filter is easily understood when interpreting results.

Now, I could write a whole article on this chart alone!

• Notice that almost 14% of respondents say that they feel 'politically homeless' (meaning I don't agree with either end of this spectrum).
• Another approx. 20% said that they are 'in the middle'. That means that...

A THIRD of the population don't consider themselves to be left or right on the political spectrum!

Further, we can see that the rest of the population is also split with another third saying that they are more Democrat and the last third being more Republican when it comes to their views on social issues. So as a starting point, many social stances you choose to make are unlikely to be agreed upon by a majority, because the population is so evenly split at this moment in time that universals are probably difficult to find!

This leads me to my next frustration with the majority of research on this topic: they tend to focus on only the positives versus the negatives of 'purpose driven marketing'.

I believe that part of this has been based on the assumption that only 1 side of the political continuum (Democrat) will be driven to negative actions related to social stances. I'm not sure that this assumption persists after the highly politicized 2023 year, but I still thought it was important to understand both the positive and negative aspects of 'purpose driven marketing' tactics and how that varies across the political spectrum. See below for some simple and straightforward ways to answer this question.

First, we can see that while 52% of those on the left say that they have boycotted a brand, 48% of Republicans report the same and even 36% of those in the Middle/Political Homeless report doing so.

Once again, we don't see a large variance between the Democrat and Republican ends of the continuum here. We do however see the Middle/Political Homeless less likely to answer 'yes' to this question.

Most importantly here, you can compare the results of those two questions in order to assess the relative risks and rewards...

In every case we see a greater risk than reward for taking a stance on contentious issues. Not by a small factor either, we are talking about 42% to 48% more risk than reward to all groups.

What if we try to be even more straightforward than that?

I just came straight-out and asked respondents: Do you think that every company or brand needs to/should explain their stance on social issues?

Again, the results when asked in an unbiased non-leading way ran counter to what I had seen in other studies. This time, we are going to focus on the 'No' percentage, because it is much larger.

We do see a larger variance across groups here, with 62% of Democrats saying 'No', but 71% of Republicans saying 'No'. However, that shouldn't really be the key take-away here, what you should focus on is that:

69% of the total (Everyone) does NOT think that every company or brand should explain their stance on social issues!

There is more data available than I am willing or able to share in this article, however data point after data point supports the position that the majority of people on the left, right and center of the political spectrum don't expect all brands to take a stand on social issues and that the risks of doing were often greater than the potential rewards.

Lastly, I wanted to tackle a question that others have attempted to answer using stock market or financial analyses that were either based on judgment, or lacked the ability to control for external factors (like the overall market return or other variables).

I wanted to understand if Brand Affinity was negatively or positively impacted by the perception of a brand's political alignment.

This is both difficult to do and highly contentious, so I am going to present the results below in a blinded manner that focuses on two things:

1. A measure of brand affinity based on Upsiide's Idea Score. For more on how that works and why it is robust, you can see an overview here, but also feel free to contact me to learn more.
2. A rating of each brand on a scale with the following points: More Republican, In The Middle/No Political Leaning, More Democrat, I Don't Know This Brand.

I chose 22 very large and well-known brands for these two exercises. Then I combined the results focusing on the % who indicated 'In The Middle' X Brand Affinity (Idea Score). You can see the results below:

Again, the brands here are all blinded, because none of these companies were asked for their permission to share this information. What I did see based on looking at this data was that the two brands in the lower left were both at extreme ends of the continuum, the Beverage Alcohol brand was seen as very Democrat and the Social Media brand was seen as very Republican.

While the overall r-squared isn't extremely high, I could improve it substantially by removing a few outliers in Telecomm and Foodservice that could be easily explained with other factors (namely, much more important drivers for brand affinity than political leaning).

However, I am still confident in noting that NOT having a strong political affiliation is not likely to negatively affect brand affinity, but the inverse can be true in the most extreme cases.

So how does all of this answer the question: Should Brands Stay Out Of The Culture Wars?

Well, I think it offers data in a very straightforward and unbiased way to indicate that brands shouldn't feel compelled by consumers to enter the fray.

However, I would be naive to say that is the only group to consider. The reality is that brands face pressure from numerous groups to take stances on social issues including: consumers, employees, shareholders, board members and special interest groups.

Ultimately, CEOs and CMOs will make the choices that both align with their personal moral compasses and also those that align best with the numerous groups that they need to work with and consider.

As a consumer insights professional, my job is to provide the clearest answers to my clients as possible. That means that I should strive to create unbiased methods and a clear and concise interpretation of the data. While all methods and questions will always have some point of contention, it is important that every attempt is made by your consultants to provide the most truthful and informative analysis that they can.

I don't think that most (if not all) of the studies I have seen on this topic over the last few years have attempted to do that, and in so doing they have not provided clients the data they need to make informed decisions.

If you want to know more about this study (including if we asked about your brands and how they fared), please feel to DM me and I would be happy to take you through the detailed dashboards.