Eric Yaverbaum can still remember the pale look on his client’s face.
It was 1994, and Yaverbaum was handling public relations for Ikea. The Swedish home-furnishings giant had expanded to the United States a decade earlier. Feeling confident it had a good read on the American public, the company decided to roll out an ad called “Dining Room Table.” The 30-second spot featured two middle-aged men (“We’ve been together about three years,” said one) shopping for a dining set.
It was the first time that a gay male couple had been shown on a national TV ad campaign.
Based in Scandinavia, Ikea “had much more progressive views than where we were at 30 years ago,” Yaverbaum told Adweek. “They said, ‘What’s the big deal?’ And I said: ‘The big deal is what you’re going to feel the day after.’”
And feel it, Ikea did.
Within hours of the spot’s debut, protesters appeared. The store in Hicksville, NY, evacuated its customers amid a bomb threat. The American Family Association commenced a boycott. Meanwhile, hate mail piled up on the desk of Ikea’s U.S. corporate chief, who was genuinely dismayed over why some Americans were so angry.
It would have been easy to just pull the spot, but Ikea didn’t. And despite the fears of lost sales and defecting customers, none of that really happened.
“All anybody remembers about Ikea is they did the right thing—that’s it,” Yaverbaum said.
As the world’s leading marketers converge on Cannes at the peak of Pride month, corporate chiefs might do well to read a little history like this. After all, it feels awfully familiar. Looking at the wide array of LGBTQ+ promotions this year, it’s hard to find a brand that hasn’t taken a beating—and the threat of a boycott—for doing it. Nike, Adidas, Bud Light, Target, Walmart—all have come into the crosshairs.
When The North Face debuted its Summer of Pride campaign featuring a drag queen named Pattie Gonia, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) took to Twitter and called for shoppers to “boycott any product North Face has ever made,” adding: “How many times do we have to explain to the woke marketing departments at these disgusting companies that America is not a nation of degenerates?”
Even smaller brands are sweating it out right now because no position seems safe. On the one hand, a company would be foolish not to court the country’s LGBTQ+ community: Not only does it pack an estimated $1.4 trillion in spending power, Gen Z consumers have telegraphed their expectation that brands be inclusive. At the same time, the possibility of falling sales and lost customers haunts C-suites across the country.
What options are left for a progressively minded CMO to take?
Taking stock of how major brands have responded (or failed to respond) to recent backlash, Adweek solicited the counsel of some of the country’s leading marketing thinkers. We then funneled all this advice into five coping strategies.
Assess before you react.
Fearing any bad press that might swing their stock prices, major brands seem conditioned to respond immediately to backlash. And little wonder: 2023 is proving to be an especially divisive, angry year. Consider Twitter personality The Patriotic Blonde’s response to Walmart’s rainbow merchandise: “These woke companies need to know that enough is enough,” she tweeted. “Not ONE MORE FUCKING DAY.” (Walmart did not respond to Adweek’s request for an interview.)
“The vitriol has reached levels that brands are not accustomed to facing,” observes brand strategist and consultant David J. Deal. “Brands are constantly on their heels because they are dealing with a response that is more violent, more visceral and more well organized than ever before.”
Yet that’s also a reason to take a breath before responding, suggested CMO adviser Lola Bakare.
“Let’s really assess the actual situation in terms of what, practically and specifically, is going on—versus what emotionally is going on,” she said. Brands can and do offend some consumers, who can and do push back for logical reasons. However, “if we determine that the protest is driven by hate or intolerance, then we need to take that back to our company values—what we’ve committed to from a shareholder standpoint.”
We’ll get to values in a moment. But first, a note on timing: By all means, devote the necessary resources to composing a response—but don’t wait forever. When Bud Light inked a sponsorship deal with trans TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney in April, the backlash was fierce and swift—most memorably, Kid Rock’s video of him shooting cases of Bud Light with a semiautomatic rifle. (“Fuck you, Bud Light,” Rock added.)
Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth did respond with a public message, but not until April 14. A subsequent study by the PR analytics firm Memo concluded that the company “waited too long to address the controversy,” allowing negative stories to pile up and set the tone. (Anheuser-Busch declined to comment for this story.)
Read that mission statement.
When Bakare speaks to audiences of senior marketers at conferences, she sees the look of surprise on many faces when she reminds them that their companies already have a framework in place for dealing with crisis situations like anti-woke retaliation. It’s the mission statement they worked so hard on.
Consider these tidbits drawn from the values statements of some of the world’s biggest brands. Starbucks: “Creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome.” Nike: “Do the right thing.” Coca-Cola: “Diversity: As inclusive as our brands.” Ben and Jerry’s: “We strive to show a deep respect for human beings inside and outside our company and for the communities in which they live.”
Assuming the C-suite doesn’t want its brand to look hypocritical, now’s the time to stick to that mission. “[I’d also] remind them,” Bakare said, “that they often have to sacrifice what seems like the desirable business outcome in the moment in order to create more of them in the long term.”
Earlier this month, for example, Ben and Jerry’s pulled its advertising off Twitter, citing the platform’s preponderance of hate speech, which “is unconscionable in addition to being plain bad business,” said the company in a statement.
Deal lauds Ben & Jerry’s for that move, and echoes Bakare’s advice, too. “Brands need to live their values,” he said. “Their values are being tested right now and in very dramatic and visceral ways.”
Deal even suggests upping the ante. “Now’s the time for businesses to do a gut check,” he said. ‘How well do your health care benefits address the needs of transgender employees? Do you contribute to political candidates who are fighting for transgender rights? In this era of transparency, brands can no longer have their cake and eat it too.”
Deal is alluding to how Disney’s longstanding support for its LGBTQ+ employees recently clashed, in March, with its silence over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill (a/k/a the “Don’t Say Gay” measure)—and got called out by its own workers. “That example demonstrates that if you’re not living your values, you are going to get found out,” Deal said.
For his part, Yaverbaum also counsels brands to raise the stakes. “Take a note from the North Face, who encountered backlash and threats during their rollout of the Summer of Pride campaign,” he said. “Instead of backing down, North Face doubled down on its support for the community.”
[Brands] often have to sacrifice what seems like the desirable business outcome in the moment in order to create more of them in the long term.
—Lola Bakare, CMO adviser
Indeed they did. For Pride month, The North Face partnered with drag queen Pattie Gonia in a campaign that prompted Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to tweet: “We can save a fortune NOT wasting money on labels that are grooming our children.”
“We’re partnering with Pattie because we believe the outdoors are for everyone,” corporate responded. “The North Face online community is designed to be a safe, positive and inclusive environment. It’s why we have a zero-tolerance policy against racist, discriminatory, threatening, abusive, harmful, vulgar or attacking social media comments.”
Pick a side. You basically have to.
Jim Fielding has held C-suite posts at companies including DreamWorks, The Gap and Disney, and is also the author of the upcoming book All Pride, No Ego: A Queer Executive’s Journey to Living and Leading Authentically. In Fielding’s view, a company can’t credibly respond to anti-woke threats unless its executives are willing to fess up to their motives for being woke in the first place.
“The first thing I’d say to the leadership is: What were the reasons for doing it [supporting LGBTQ+] originally? Did you do this because you thought it was a moneymaking opportunity? Or were you doing it because you really believe in being an ally to the queer community? If they were honest with me and said they were half in it, then you know what? Don’t bother. If you’re not willing to weather the storm, take the [Pride merchandise] off your floor and never do it again.”
On the other hand, Fielding continued, “If you’re doing this for the right reasons, [then] reach out to the queer community and let us use our voices and our platforms and our advocacy. Because we’re powerful, too.”
Call haters out—and be willing to lose them as customers.
Bakare said she often wonders why brands take such pains to be civil to attackers who, on social media, are not civil at all. “The line ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ is the thing I want every CMO to have top of mind,” she said.
Put another way: Get some guts and call out bigotry when you see it.
Why would a company want to be so brash? Because the alternative is looking half assed. “Neither Bud Light nor Target condemned bigoted behavior,” Deal said. “Bud Light threw Dylan Mulvaney under the bus. Target either removed or hid its pride merchandise.” He’s referring to the retailer’s decision to remove its trans-friendly swimsuits and other “items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior,” as the company phrased it.
In fairness to Target (which did not respond to Adweek’s request for comment) angry customers did throw items on the floor and get combative with sales associates. But Fielding believes the suitable response to that would have been hiring security, not marring what’s otherwise a long track record of supporting the LGBTQ+ community.
But is it realistic to expect a major brand to risk alienating its own customers by taking a principled stance? Actually, yes. In 2020, the U.K. supermarket chain Sainsbury’s weathered a storm of bigoted commentary following an ad that did nothing more than portray a Black family celebrating Christmas.
In response, a group of supermarkets publicly took Sainbury’s side. One of them, Co-Op, then took to Twitter and said: “We definitely don’t welcome shoppers who think it’s okay to post racist tweets or comments.”
Yes, Co-Op was willing to fire its own customers. In fact, so was Garth Brooks, whose Nashville bar Friends in Low Places recently decided to keep serving Bud Light despite widespread calls to dump it.
“If you [come] into this house, love one another,” Brooks said during a Billboard magazine event. “If you’re an asshole, there are plenty of other places on lower Broadway.”
Boycotts are scary—but they rarely amount to much.
In most cases of backlash against woke marketing, the aggrieved party calls for a boycott of the brand. And such threats can be serious. As the New York Post reported, A-B InBev’s stock fell by 4% during the week of the Dylan Mulvaney debacle, losing some $27 billion in market value.
What’s rarely reported, however, is how companies that suffer a dip in stock price—driven mostly by bad PR that spooks investors—almost invariably recover that money.
Ed Ponsi, managing director of Barchetta Capital Management, explored this pattern in a recent piece on investing site TheStreet. “When a company is under fire by the public, and consumers threaten a boycott, the immediate reaction is a temporary decline in the stock,” Ponsi wrote. “Then, the anger passes and the stock recovers. First, they get upset, and then they forget.”
Did you know that Amazon has been under a boycott over its purported tax-avoidance practices since 2012? Amazon still posted a net sales increase of 9%, to $127 billion, in the first quarter. The group American Conservative Values current lists 35 companies it encourages consumers not to invest in. Topping the list is Apple, which posted revenues of $394.3 billion in 2022, an 8% increase over the year prior.
But what about those reportedly staggering losses based on Anheuser-Busch’s stock price? Admittedly, some are still predicting that Bud Light is damaged permanently. Yet Deal is skeptical.
“Boycotts seldom have any long-term impact,” he said. “Myriad factors affect any brand’s stock price in any given week, and to single out a boycott as a sole factor is a specious argument.”
Once again, it pays to read a little branding history.
Way back in 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention called for a boycott over Disney after the company extended domestic-partner benefits to its LGBTQ+ employees. But Disney revenues for 1998 were still up by 2% from 1997, to over $22.9 billion. (In 2022, they hit $82.7 billion.) The SBC finally called its boycott off in 2005. Last year, a letter to the editor of the Southern Baptist News said the following: “The Disney boycott of 1997 did not work. What it did do was create animosity between Southern Baptists and the entire nonbelieving world.”
