A client asked me last month whether they should say something. About what, I said. She said it didn't really matter, they just felt like they should be saying something. She had a competitor's Instagram post open on her laptop and the expression of a person watching a party from the sidewalk in the rain.
This is the most common question I get now, and it is almost always the wrong one. 'Should we say something' is a question about anxiety. The useful question is where the brand already stands, whether anybody has said it out loud or not.
Because silence is a position. It is just an unchosen one.
Brand activism is not a switch, it is a spectrum, and the only fatal error is claiming a spot on it you cannot actually stand on.
Five positions, and all five are legitimate. One, silent: the brand says nothing, ever, about anything outside its category. Two, aligned: the values are real and operational, they live in the supply chain and the benefits package, and they are simply not marketed. Three, responsive: the brand speaks when an issue touches its category or its people, and stays quiet otherwise. Four, advocating: the brand spends its own money and attention on something it did not have to touch. Five, founded: the issue is the reason the company exists and the product is the funding mechanism.
Patagonia is a five and has been since long before any of us had vocabulary for it. When they sued over Bears Ears in December, that was not a brand position. That was the company doing the thing the company is for. Ben & Jerry's is a four and has the receipts to prove it. Most of my clients are a two who very badly want to be seen as a four.
That gap is where the disasters live. The Pepsi ad last spring was a company at position one attempting to perform position four in sixty seconds, with no operational claim to any of it and nothing behind the ad but the ad. The internet did not punish Pepsi for caring about protest. It punished Pepsi for pretending, badly.
Because silence is a position. It is just an unchosen one.
So we spent an afternoon writing down what my client actually does. Where they source. What they pay. Which of their people get benefits and which don't. It was a short, slightly grim list. It put them at a two, and a two is fine. A two that stops apologizing for being a two can start quietly becoming a three. That is a real strategy. The Instagram post was not.
I walked back through the Pearl afterward and stopped for a scoop at Salt & Straw, which is a brand that has never once told me what it believes about anything, and which I trust completely.