On January 6th, I was sitting on my couch in Portland watching the Capitol breach unfold on my phone while my cat Truffles aggressively kneaded my laptop keyboard. There was something absurdly surreal about refreshing Twitter between CNN live feeds while a cat tried to compose an email to my boss.
Within hours, I watched brand after brand face a decision that no crisis communications playbook had adequately prepared them for. Shopify deplatformed Trump's stores. Twitter and Facebook banned the sitting president. Stripe cut off campaign payment processing. Hallmark asked for donations back from Senators Hawley and Cruz.
Emily Weiss built Glossier by reading 1,000 comments on her blog before designing a single product. The audience wasn't the market. The audience was the R&D department.
And I thought: this is the moment the "brands staying out of politics" era officially died.
And I thought: this is the moment the "brands staying out of politics" era officially died.
Here is what fascinates me as a strategist. For years, the conventional wisdom was that brands should avoid politics because it alienates half your audience. The math was simple. Why risk losing 50% of your customers over something that is not your product?
But January 6th revealed the new math: inaction is now a position. Silence is a statement. The white space between "we condemn" and "we said nothing" has collapsed entirely.
Look at what happened to Parler's cloud hosting. Amazon Web Services did not just remove a customer; they removed a customer that other customers found objectionable. The B2B calculation changed. When your enterprise clients start asking why you are hosting a platform associated with an insurrection, "we are politically neutral" stops being a viable answer.
This is not about left or right. This is about the fundamental shift in what consumers expect from the institutions they interact with. A 2020 Edelman study showed that 60% of consumers will buy or boycott based on a brand's response to social issues. After January 6th, I would bet that number went up.
The brands that moved fastest looked decisive. The brands that waited looked calculating. And the brands that said nothing looked complicit. There is no longer a safe middle lane.
For strategists, this means crisis preparedness is no longer about having a statement ready. It is about knowing, in advance, what your brand stands for and what it will not tolerate. That clarity is not marketing. It is organizational identity work that needs to happen before the crisis hits.
I think we will look back at early January 2021 as the inflection point where brand neutrality became brand negligence. The question is no longer whether you will take a position. It is whether you will choose it, or have it chosen for you.