I'm going to say something controversial for someone in branding: cancel culture, as a phenomenon, is mostly just consumer accountability moving faster than brands are comfortable with. The speed is new. The mechanism isn't.
Brands have always been held accountable for their actions by consumers. Boycotts existed before Twitter. Consumer advocacy organizations existed before Instagram. The difference is that now the organizing happens in hours instead of months, the documentation is permanent, and the audience is global instead of local.
Brands have always been held accountable for their actions by consumers.
This terrifies brands because they built their response infrastructure for a slower news cycle. The crisis communications team needs 48 hours to draft a statement. Twitter needs you to respond in 48 minutes. That gap between brand response speed and public expectation speed is where most 'cancellation' damage occurs.
My practical advice to clients: you cannot prevent being held accountable. You can only choose whether you're held accountable for something you did deliberately or something you did carelessly. Deliberate positions, even controversial ones, are defensible. Careless mistakes are not. So be deliberate.
The brands that survive accountability moments are the ones who can honestly say: 'yes, we chose this position, here's why, and we stand by it.' The ones that crumble are the ones who did something thoughtlessly and now have to either defend a position they never actually chose or apologize for something they didn't mean. Choose your positions. Don't stumble into them.
I wrote most of this at my favorite window table at Ovation, watching Portland do its thing.