I'm writing this on Wednesday morning. I won't pretend to be neutral about the election results (I'm a human with opinions), but that's not what this space is for. This space is for strategy. And from a strategy perspective, last night clarified something that's been building for years.
The American consumer market is not one market. It hasn't been for a while. And now we have to stop pretending otherwise.
For the last decade, brands have tried to thread an increasingly impossible needle: appeal to a progressive cultural vanguard (who dominate creative industries and social media) while also selling to a moderate-to-conservative majority (who dominate actual purchase volume in most categories). The tension was always there. It just became impossible to ignore.
The Bud Light situation last year was the canary. The election results are the confirmation. We live in a country where cultural signaling in either direction has real commercial consequences, and the "apolitical brand" is becoming a fiction.
So what do you do?
I think there are three viable paths:
Path 1: Pick a side and own it. Patagonia does this. Ben & Jerry's does this. They've decided their customer is a specific person with specific values, and they're willing to lose everyone else. This is honest and strategically clean, but it requires genuine conviction and a business model that can absorb the customer loss.
Path 2: Be genuinely useful and stay quiet. Most brands should probably be here. Your laundry detergent doesn't need political opinions. Your SaaS platform doesn't need a stance on immigration. Make a great product. Market it on functional and emotional benefits that transcend political identity. Shut up about everything else. Not every silence is complicity. Sometimes silence is just good strategy.
Not every silence is complicity. Sometimes silence is just good strategy.
Path 3: Build a brand that transcends the division. This is the hardest path and the one I find most interesting. Brands like Costco, Trader Joe's, and Dolly Parton (who is absolutely a brand) manage to be beloved across political lines because their core value proposition isn't coded to either side. Value. Surprise. Generosity. Authenticity. These are apolitical virtues that resonate regardless of who you voted for.
What I'd caution against: Path 1.5, where you signal progressive values when it's convenient and go quiet when it's not. Consumers on both sides can smell opportunism, and the penalty for perceived inauthenticity is now higher than the penalty for any actual position.
Here's my honest take after a sleepless night: the brands that will thrive in the next four years are the ones that know exactly who they are and who they're for, regardless of the political weather. Clarity of identity has always been good strategy. It's now essential strategy.
The mushy middle is gone: the one where you try to be everything to everyone, where you draft a carefully-worded statement that says nothing, where you put a flag in your bio in June and take it down in July.
It was always gone, honestly. We just couldn't see it clearly until last night.