So the culture wars have taken a dark turn for US businesses, with major companies now facing threats and intimidation over their LBGTQ marketing.
More fallout now over the new voting law in Georgia.
Major League Baseball pulled the All Star Game out of Atlanta, and over the.
Week Georgia House Republicans is canceling Coca Cola. They're saying pepsi is okay after the company CEO spoke out against the state's new restrictive voting law, asking for all coke products to be removed from their offices.
Corporations once tried to stay far away from America's political and culture wars, but in recent years that has become increasingly difficult. Customers and employees are demanding companies take a stand on issues like racial discrimination, police violence, and LGBTQ rights, and when they do, it sometimes puts these corporations on a collision course with politicians like Donald Trump.
You read about starbar no more Merry Christmas on Starbucks no More.
That's led to protests and product boycotts. Bloomberg business Week's national correspondent Joshua Green reports that CEOs now have to weigh which poses a bigger threat to their brands speaking up or staying quiet.
What we saw in the Trump rays was that a lot of people had cultural concerns. There was a sort of cultural consciousness among Trump voters that really wasn't being spoken to by other candidates. These same people brought that cultural consciousness to consumer choices.
I'm Westcsova today on the Big Take. Business and politics make for a volatle mix.
Hey Josh, Hey Wes.
Good to see you again, talking once again about America's political and culture wars.
Pretty much all I cover these days as a national political reporter.
In this news story, you write about something a little bit different, which is how corporations, a lot of the biggest brand names that we all know, are now kind of getting pulled into these culture wars, these political wars, kicking and screaming in a lot of ways.
Yeah, you know.
The way I put it in the piece is that corporate America has become the new battlefield in American politics. And you can see this in everything from the recent controversies, you know, from bud Light to Target to any number of brands who now seem to have been pulled in, especially by Republicans and Republican politicians into these national culture wars that have really.
Defined our politics over the last few years.
So when did this start happening and why did it start happening Because we didn't used to see these kinds of controversies over companies and politics as much as we do now.
Yeah, I think to understand the corporate culture wars, you really have to go back to the beginning of the political culture wars, which kicked off in earnest in twenty sixteen with the rise of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy. During that campaign, as you know, I was pretty deeply embedded with a Trump campaign. I met a guy, a Republican data scientist named Matt Askowski, who turned out to be
this fascinating figure in the Trump headquarters. He was the guy who was the head of the team working for Trump's campaign that came up with this idea that there are a pool of hidden or shy Trump voters that ordinary political polsters weren't seeing. And what Matt was seeing in his data was that this group of Trump voters didn't care about traditional Republican concerns like low taxes, foreign policy deregulation.
What they cared about were cultural issues.
Things like guns, wages, immigration, concerns that weren't front and center in what national Republicans at the time other than Donald Trump we're really talking about. So on election night there was a huge upset. It turned out there really was this population of hidden or shy Trump voters who turned out and voted. But Matt was surprised to discover there was just as much interest in the corporate world that ad agencies and Fortune five hundred brands really wanted
to discover. How it is that he'd seen these pool of people and understood their motivations in a way that nobody else really had.
And what was it that these companies wanted to know?
If you think about it in a kind of consumer brand sense, Matt had understood Trump's audience in Trump's customer base better than anybody else had, and so there are obvious applications, I think to the commercial world. Matt was squired around, like literally around the globe. He was kind of flown around to kind of talk to all these people.
What he did was basically kind of go and tell people what we saw in the Trump rays was that a lot of people had cultural concerns there was a sort of what he called cultural consciousness among Trump voters that really wasn't being spoken to by other candidates, and Matt's thesis all along was that these same people brought
that cultural consciousness to consumer choices. One of the interesting things about the corporate culture wars is that historically brands and companies did not want anything to do with politics. There was a famous line by Michael Jordan, the NBA superstar, maybe apocryphal, but he was asked, you know, why don't you get involved in politics, and his answer was, well,
I want to sell shoes to Republicans and Democrats. There was a prevailing idea that it really didn't pay off to get involved in politics if you were a corporate brand, because you wanted to be able to sell to people of all political persuasions. Well, that started to change when Donald Trump was the candidate, because he was so outrageous, so provocative, so controversial that it created a pressure, I think for a lot of brands to kind of want to speak out, both from a customer base and from
a reputational protection standpoint. So you all remember the Access Hollywood tape that came out in October twenty sixteen where Trump.
Talked about groping women.
One of the things that Trump said in that tape was that he likes to pop a tic Tac breath mint before he tries to kiss women, and Tic Tac breath Mint leadership was so appalled and scandalized by this that they went on Twitter and made a statement sort of condemning Trump. As Trump became more controversial, a lot
of other brands were pulled into his orbit. Very early on in his presidency, the White House had a Corporate Ceo Council with a lot of CEOs on it, and in early twenty seventeen, there was a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Trump refused to condemn the marchers. His quote was, there were very fine people on both sides.
And in response, the CEOs of PEPSI and IBM and General Motors, who were part of a White House advisory council, came under enormous pressure and eventually wound up resigning and the council was dissolved. Trump himself liked to go after companies Macy's for canceling his clothing brand.
I think you have to stop illegal immigration.
Macy's doesn't agree with me.
Obviously, Ford Motors.
To think that Ford is moving its small car division is a disgrace.
It's disgraceful Amazon.
Do you know how little tax Amazon pays.
What we saw was this sort of sudden up surge of politics in corporate America in a way that just really hadn't existed before, and partly because Trump himself, the US President, was attacking these brands.
Josh and your story, you write about how this effect was taking home.
Yeah.
I think the iconic example of that was the Nike Colin Kaepernick boycott. Colin Kaepernick was a former NFL quarterback who was taking a knee in order to protest police violence, and this became a hot button cultural issue, and Trump himself was very critical of Nike, of Kaepernick, of the NFL. You saw it all over conservative media outlets, and it was a great example of the way that Trump kind
of pulled corporate brands into politics. The interesting thing about that boycott, though, was that it didn't end up hurting Nike sales. A lot of younger, democratic inclined customers thought it was great that their brand was taking a stand on this issue of social justice.
It was important to them, and it was one.
Of many many corporate boycotts that Trump tried to launch that didn't work. You know, my favorite example was that Trump also tried to launch a boycott of Coca Cola. But he himself is a famous and habitual drinker of diet cokes. I was once in his office interviewing him in Trump Tower before he became president, and he had a little button on his desk that he could push and order up diet cokes. And sure enough, like somebody came in a minute later with two diet cokes on
a tray for us to drink. Trump had called for this boycott because Coca Cola had spoken out against.
Voter suppression law in Georgia.
Trump was very upset about this, called for a boycott of Coca Cola, and yet a couple days later there was are in the oval office of Trump with a diet coke can sitting next to him. So a lot of these things become important in the news cycle, but until recently they didn't necessarily have a big economic effect.
On the brands that wound up in the crosshairs.
After the break. The death of George Floyd puts pressure on companies to take a stand, Josh, Like you said, so many companies started weighing in on these culture war issues. Why did they feel compelled to say anything at all? Why didn't they just stay out of it?
I think one of the big reasons was that Trump himself was so controversial and so appalling to so many people. After he was elected in twenty sixteen, Democrats were completely shut out of power. They didn't control the White House or either House of Congress, and a lot of people were really mad about what Trump was doing. There was a Women's March, they were out basically trying to give public political expression of their dissatisfaction.
In any way they could.
One thing that wound up being effective was to put pressure on consumer brands to condemn Trump and some of Trump's actions. And I think the reason a lot of brands were willing to do that was basically a fear of disappointing their customers. And so you wind up where these kind of frankly bizarre situations where companies that you wouldn't expect to have a view on a certain political issue are coming out and taking one publicly in a way that seems designed to signal a corporate social concerts.
I think it just goes to show the pressure that a lot of these companies felt to speak out because a large part of their customer base was very distressed about these things, and they were trying to foster a connection with their customers or polish their brand reputations in a way that would make them appealing to people who were upset about the kinds of things that Trump was doing.
Josh you right, though, that in issuing these sorts of statements to appeal to one part of their consumer base, they also then ignited the other half.
Yeah, I think what you saw in the kind of the political consumer space was that this upset a lot of Republicans because, you know, they saw brands making what they consider to be explicitly democratic statements, whether it was on issues like climate change, social or racial justice, voter
id laws, all the hot button cultural issues. It appeared to a lot of Republicans and a lot of Republican activists that fortune five hundred brands were suddenly coming out and aligning themselves with Democrats on the most important political issues of the day, and that ended up creating a huge backlash.
And Josh you Wright that a very big moment was during the summer of twenty twenty.
Yeah, when George Floyd was killed in May of twenty twenty, it sparked this huge uprising all across America, protests in the streets for racial justice, condemning police violence. And part of that response was a corporate response, and many brands
came out and condemn racial injustice, police violence. In some cases they expressed support for organizations like Black Lives Matter and put themselves front and center in a political and social moment that was very much still in dispute over what it meant, what the.
Causes were, who was at fault.
These brands took an explicit political position on an issue in a cultural moment that was highly charged around issues of structural racism, inequality, and all the big questions that were really at the heart of American politics. And at the same time, President Trump was out criticizing the protesters, criticizing Black Lives Matter, and politicizing.
The issue even more.
And so here was this supercharged national tragedy that was being disputed not just by protesters and politicians, but that corporate brands now had been pulled in the middle of and became very much a participant in the controversy themselves in a way that many of them maybe weren't hoping to be.
And Josh you right that this is sort of a significant shift in the way Republicans look at corporations versus the way Democrats have looked at corporations.
The corporate response to George Floyd really caused a sea change in the way that people view corporations. Gallup has done long standing tracking poll asking Republicans and Democrats, do you think that corporations have too much, too little, or an appropriate amount of power. What we'd seen historically was that Democrats tended to think that big corporations wielded too
much power, and Republicans were basically fine with it. But in the wake of George Floyd, what you see is the Republican backlash in these Gallup polling numbers, and all of a sudden in twenty twenty, the number of Republicans who think major corporations have too much influence suddenly doubles and stay that high. And you can see the conservative unhappiness with the fact that a lot of these brands are coming out and taking positions that they perceive as
being liberal or democratic. This view among conservatives was not wrong. It is backed up by actual research from other people in my story. One of the most interesting guys I interviewed for this piece was a data scientist at the University of Chicago, SHOWBC Berrari, who had a sense that brand statements seemed to be more liberal in the wake of George Floyd than they had been before then, and he went looking for data to kind of back up
his hunch, and he couldn't find any. So what he did was he went out and assembled about two million Twitter and Instagram posts from the thousand biggest US brands, and he coded them for partisan sentiment. It turned out that before George Bloyd there wasn't a lot of corporate public political expression, and what there was tended to be sort of Republican leading.
But after George Floyd there was indeed.
A huge explosion of corporate speech, and that corporate speech was very clearly liberal.
So servatives weren't imagining.
The fact that corporations, which had traditionally been allied with the Republican Party were now coming out and forcefully taking stances on social issues that were ones that aligned with Democrats, not Republicans.
The other thing that.
Was interesting is Matt went and surveyed thousands of people who were participating in these boycotts across the political spectrum, and what he found was that the people who launched these boycotts are very much like the people who produced most of the political content on social media. Like normy moderate people don't post a lot about politics. It tends to be driven by extreme partisans on the left and on the right, And the same thing turned out to
be true of these corporate boycotts. They're driven by political activists, liberal ones and conservative ones.
What Matt called the vast.
Movable middle of people who are aware of these boycotts, not necessarily interested in them, but then wind up being pulled into them anyway. And you can see the effect on something like the recent bud Light boycotts that were
driven by bud Lights advertising campaign. They hired a social media influencer, Dylan mulvany, and it caused this huge backlash among Republicans that was big enough that it actually hurt bud Lights sales and caused them to lose their position as the number one beer brand in America.
After more than two decades as the best selling beer in the US. Bud Light giving up that title to Midello in May, after Boycott's and the wake of the brand's decision to partner with a trans influencer, and the controversy that continues to follow.
In Matt's telling, what happened in that case was that these boycotts were pushed by a lot of right wing media influencers, but they caught on with Fox News and with talk radio, and all of a sudden you had people who hadn't really given much thought about the politics of their beer brand cared about it and stopped drinking bud Light and Josh.
Recently, Target two had come under from the right.
Yeah, Target was the object of protests and pressure campaigns in response to LGBTQ Pride Month displays that they'd had out at a lot of stores, and once again became this kind of political cause among Republicans, got a lot of airtime and criticism on Fox News and helped drive down Target sales to the point that a lot of
stores remove these displays. So it's another example, along with butt Light, of these political protests having real world effects in a way that they might not have ten or twenty years ago.
When we come back, can companies avoid getting pulled into politics, Josh. Some of these protests against companies have had an effect on sales, others haven't. Is there evidence that companies are changing their behavior now the sorts of issues they weigh in in response to the possibility that they could come under fire.
I think there is. I mean.
One of the people I talked to for the story was a tough university political science named Aton Hirsch, who
studies this stuff and talks to corporate leaders. He conducts a broad survey of business leaders on their politics, and one of the things he pointed out was that the corporate social response to George Floyd I think had some unexpected consequences for corporations, not in terms of the backlash, but in terms of these companies own employees and customers expected them to begin to weigh in on other social
issues in the news. Suddenly they were coming under pressure to speak out against things like anti Asian violence, which many of them did, but they were also coming under
pressure from conservative groups. I read through transcripts of corporate earning calls looking to see how these issues play out, and one of the things you see is conservative groups coming in on these corporate earning calls and asking the CEO, and they say, well, you know you have this LGBT group, how come there aren't groups that support republic and employees Republican voters, and so companies started these too. So a lot of companies now have veterans groups and so on.
But I think at a macro level, it created a set of conditions companies didn't necessarily understand they were getting into where they were suddenly being expected to weigh.
In on every issue.
The problem now is that having kind of opened that can of worms and having spoken out, having become pulled into the process, it's really hard for brands and CEOs to figure out how to back out of it.
Josh. You also right that there's an additional pressure on corporate executives, not just from consumers, but from their own employees, who sometimes demand that the company takes the stand, and the corporate leadership feels like they have to respond.
So great example this is Florida Governor Ron de Santis signed the so called Don't Say Gay Law in Florida that would have prevented school teachers from teaching LGBTQ issues. Disney CEO at the time, Bob Chapek, came under a lot of pressure from employees to speak out against the Don't Say Gay law. He eventually did, and that put Disney in the crosshairs of Ron de Santis in Florida.
Our policy is going to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of.
What operation better.
Desantas's attacks on Disney for a while became the basis of his whole political identity and helped give rise to his presidential campaign.
Josh, you say that this has kind of become the new political reality for companies. Do you think that it stays that way. Do you think companies are now going to become more reluctant to weigh in on politics, or do you think they're in a position where they're just going to have to keep doing it and find their way through.
I think a lot of companies are very reluctant and don't want to be in the position of a Disney or a bud Light for all sorts of reasons. You know, it hurts sales, it hurts their brand reputation, it can hurt morale among employees and potential recruits. But it's not
clear how these companies can extract themselves. A lot of people in politics, Democrats and Republicans, have realized that these companies and the issues they stand for can be politicized, and that companies can be pressured to kind of speak out on political issues in a way that.
Partisans find very advantageous.
Having begun to do so more and more, it's not really clear how easy it's going to be for these companies to back out. Talking to Professor Hirsch, he told me he speaks to a lot of these CEOs, he's been working with him for years in his studies, and he says, you know that they're really grappling with this issue.
They don't know what to do.
They don't want to alienate customers by refusing to speak out, and so they're all sort of left in the same boat, which is sort of trying to figure out how they can navigate these crisis in a way that keeps them out of the political crosshairs.
Josh, always great talking to you, Thanks for coming on the show.
Great to be with you.
Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. More shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producers are Moe Barrow and Michael Falero. Phil de Garcia is our engineer.
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