The Calcification of Brands

As a society, we find ourselves increasingly intertwined with the ethics of the companies we patronize. A recent study found that 82% of shoppers want a consumer brand's values to align with their own, indicating a willingness to vote with their wallets if they don't feel a match. This sentiment is especially strong among young consumers, who often prioritize brand alignment with their political and social values.

However, the reality of this shift is complex and fraught with challenges. Brands, by nature, are entities driven by profit. Their primary goal is to make money, and they're fluid, adaptable entities that aim to reflect the evolving trends and sentiments of their audience. The issue arises when these entities are expected to take a firm political stance.

Brands are collectives of individuals with a diverse range of ideologies, life experiences, and beliefs. Demanding they align their politics with ours is essentially asking for the suppression of dissenting views within the organization—a step towards calcification, where everything becomes rigid and self-reinforcing.

Up until yesterday, societies with dissenting views lived apart; and even those societies that had some diversity of thought, squashed the minorities’ perspectives in favour of the ruling majority’s beliefs.

So, the great challenge democracies have always faced is simple: how do I manage to coexist with people I don’t like. That has been the most important evolution in politics in recent history—how do I live with people I don’t like without killing them.

As time went by, this so called “majority” decoupled itself from its original meaning of quantity—how many people agree with us—, and moved towards where money and purchasing power was concentrated (the youth, urbanites, and other elites).

This inherently led to a growth in tribalism within our societies where said tribes began dictating where we should buy from, who we should interact with, and even where we should live at. This polarization, this "calcification" of our behaviors, reveals an uncomfortable truth—that society hasn't evolved, and doesn’t evolve, a single inch throughout time.

In the past, politicians from different parties were still part of the same social transit—one day I win, the other you win, but we’re still golfing together in the weekend—today, this balance of compromise has been lost. As societies became more equitable, individuals have grown more powerful, meaning their pedestrian opinion of things shared on social media has created echo chambers that further reinforce their views, fueling increased polarization and intolerance.

So, this idea that we accept those whose’ ideas we disagree with is a flat-out lie. It looks good on the surface but the reality is that when a dissenting group runs up against a more powerful one, the more powerful one still wants to destroy that group, or at least reduce their ability to have influence in society.

Alarmingly, this calcification of thought is more evident among the youth, who demand that companies align their values with their own. But the harsh reality is that young people’s certainties should center around personal life milestones instead of having firmly rooted convictions about the world—a place they know very little about yet, having just recently graduated from university.

All of this is to say that we have effectively created “bubbles” in society where people can rest peacefully within their groups knowing that everyone and everything they interact with aligns with what they believe in. It’s all around us: there are literal parallel economies emerging in the USA where you can find liberal vs conservative brand options that fit with your political values—from social media platforms and newspapers, to coffee and chocolate bar brands.

This is proof that Europeans and North Americans have gone on such a tangent over the past few decades that in reality they were just trying to sell more industrialized products and services, in turn creating an insane ecosystem distorted by tribalism. In this fanatic environment we live in today, people will quite literally refuse to buy from a certain brand because they heard that someone in that company advocated for something they don’t like. But up until the day they learned about that, they kept buying from that brand and loved their price. And of course, this type of behaviour is reserved only to those who have money to take such a stance—if you’re broke or live in a poor country, forget it, you don’t have the luxury to be picky.

Consumers now choose Brand X over Brand Y because of a social stance they took, with little regard to how the company treats its own employees. But the brutal reality of capitalism is that the simple fact that Company X is deceiving the youth by saying they’re saving the planet from burning, will make this very same youth more vulnerable to be exploited by making them work longer hours while making less money all in the name of said noble cause.

It is quite alarming that this calcification of thought exported by rich nations is taking place so prominently among the youth. The line between activism and commercial activity has disappeared, and people can’t quite grasp the implications of that.

A case in point is Bud Light's recent campaign against transphobia, which resulted in billions of dollars in losses. An attempt at championing a good cause resulted in economic blowback, illustrating the complex relationship between business and social advocacy. And you can easily trace back what led them to this point: decisions were made by executives who were likely formed at American universities where professors kept telling them that they could change the world through advertising, which was further reinforced by them getting promoted at their companies too soon and making short-sighted decisions that actually ended up further entrenching discrimination and polarization between ideologically contrasting groups in society.

It’s a classic example of market forces overriding ideological pursuits—if it makes money we keep doing it; if it doesn’t make money we cut it. Capitalism is ruthless.

So, as we’ve seen, we are living in an era of heightened social awareness and increasing pressure on brands to align with our values. However, this environment has led to increasing polarization and intolerance. Ultimately, the hope is that at some point this group hysteria in the market calms down, and people are allowed to live the way they want—you want to be trans, go for it; you want to be cis, that’s ok too—and that young executives resist the urge to force people to like what they believe they should like.

PPA