Advertising Age published a perspective advocating for brands to hold firm on their values—especially when facing cultural and political pressures—to avoid alienating key consumer segments.
Okay, except there’s plenty of data underscoring how brands undervalue non-White audiences—and often don’t value such groups at all.
For brands, true values and value can be measured in performative PR, heat shields, and crumbs.
Brand values must hold firm, even under cultural pressure
By Tara DeVeaux
As a child from the Northeast with parents from Virginia and South Carolina, I remember Cracker Barrel as a part of the annual trips “down south” to visit family. I thought it was as much for us as it was for anyone else. I don’t think I ever thought about the logo once. I’d guess most people would have been hard-pressed to draw it from memory if they had to (there’s a barrel, right?).
When the restaurant redesigned the logo to remove Uncle Herschel and then quickly caved to public outcry over its “woke rebrand,” my first thought was: Wait, was the old man supposed to be a “cracker?”
And more importantly, I questioned what signal the company was sending. Does it see itself as a whites-only brand? Are my family and I no longer welcome? Have I been wrong about this brand’s values all these years?
Cracker Barrel is just the latest example of a brand navigating current consumer sentiment and beliefs about its brand with rapidly shifting cultural mores. Its choices are a reminder of how woven brands are into the fabric of consumers’ lives. These include Target, with its public pullback on DE&I initiatives in January, and American Eagle, with its Sydney Sweeney wink to blue “genes.”
In the words of Marvin Gaye, “What’s going on?”
Whether purposeful or not, brand advertising is raising the hackles of the consumers it is supposed to court. And like many human-to-human relationships, the cause of the consumer alienation starts with a perceived betrayal. A betrayal of the values the brand has communicated, advertently or otherwise, that consumers held dear.
That’s why brand values, once firmly established, must be unshakable. They can evolve as culture evolves, but they cannot tremble and collapse from a shift in political winds unless they want to risk consumer alienation and declining sales.
Some brands seem to be getting it right. Shareholders of Costco, another big-box retailer beloved by its clientele, overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to reevaluate its DE&I policies in January, the same month Target announced its rollback. Lines were initially around the block, and Costco’s sales have risen steadily each month this year.
In August, Ralph Lauren launched a campaign that pays homage to the generations of African Americans who have vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard. And this brand, celebrating the Black elite, has also evolved to embrace their status as the inspiration of the “Lo Life” movement among Black and brown folks, a term of deep affection.
Values are not simply words on a corporate website or in an onboarding booklet. They are a behavior code. And when brand actions or words are inconsistent with past behavior, consumers will feel betrayed and might rebel.
Those of us who work in advertising agencies have a major role to play in advising our client partners on the importance a brand’s values play in shaping consumer sentiment.
Agencies must support our brand partners by defining a concise, actionable set of brand values and then creating a framework to test every public action, partnership, or statement against those principles. If something doesn’t align, it’s a signal to rethink.
But even with that forethought, crises will arise, which is why agencies must also help brands develop crisis agility and crisis avoidance. Before a campaign launches, agencies should simulate scenarios where a cultural flashpoint tests the brand’s values in the event of boycotts or political commentary.
To avoid knee-jerk reactions to creative work once it’s in market, agencies must combine social listening with a deeper understanding of who a client’s audience is and how they will feel in the moment. Developing a “cultural dashboard” can help distinguish real, values-related risks.
People and attitudes evolve. Brands and their messaging evolve. Advertising science evolves. I’ve written before that demographics alone are not destiny when it comes to marketing. While age, income, life stage, race, and ethnicity all play a role in developing consumer audiences, so too does the intersection of culture and community among all those groups.
Those inflection points are why so many consumers could relate to Cracker Barrel’s perceived nod to southern heritage without seeing racism and why they felt betrayed once they caved to public sentiment.
While it’s the brand that will determine its values, it’s the consumer who will hold them accountable for living up to them. Understanding the relationship between the brand and the people the brand serves is the key to unlocking continued growth.
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