U.S. marketers latest challenge: Landing a campaign message in a divided culture

The votes are in: Come January, former President Donald Trump will return to the White House and oversee an America that is deeply divided. The 2024 U.S. presidential campaign will likely be seen as one of the most fractious in history, leaving the country to wonder what’s next.

The closeness of the popular vote highlights just how split the country is. Yet the scale of Trump’s win — 312 electoral college votes to Harris’s 226 — also suggests a clean break from what’s gone before and a broader change in people’s perceptions, says J. Walker Smith, consulting knowledge lead at Kantar. The vote was an indication, he believes, that people want to restore control over areas that worried them. “Chief among these is the economy and household perceptions of affordability,” he says. “Immigration, of course. But also, culture.”

Advertisers may be asking themselves how they should show up in a society that’s culturally divided. “The ongoing micro-fragmentation of lifestyles has diminished our sense of a shared culture, and however much we disagree about how best to recover it, there is clearly a widespread desire to recapture it,” says Walker Smith. “Brands that deliver consistent, functionally reliable, stress-free, universally accessible experiences in the midst of this whirlwind of change and instability will find receptive audiences.”

However, it’s important that brands don’t leap too eagerly into the breach, cautions Craig Elimeliah, chief creative officer at Code and Theory, a New York-based creative agency. “The role of a brand now is to be a steady, authentic presence that respects the moment without pandering to it,” he says.

Elimeliah says that it’s not possible, in a country where some are eagerly anticipating and others are dreading January’s administration change, to pithily sum up the plurality and complexity of the United States into a single campaign message.

“In 2016 and 2020, brands either played it safe or went bold on divisive issues,” says Elimeliah. “But today, consumers are smarter, more skeptical, and less patient with empty gestures. This time, brands need to be genuinely purposeful; people can smell inauthenticity a mile away.”

In these early post-election days, brands might want to hold off on making any claims about uniting the country and instead reflect on how others have historically handled previous times of political tension.

Elimeliah points to 2022, when the LEGO Foundation donated MRI scanner kits to hospitals to put child patients at ease around experiencing the real-life medical diagnostic tool. He also notes ads that have appealed to human decency — such as Iceland’s “OutHorse Your Email” campaign, which lightheartedly acknowledges the work-life balance challenges that many Americans feel — also work well because it ducks politics and gets to the heart of universal human truths.

He believes a successful playbook appreciates that and instead aims to “stay true, stay relevant and differentiate authentically.” It’s an approach that Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario has called “cultural strategy,” of understanding how people are thinking, feeling, and wanting outside your immediate political and social circle.

One thing that the deep political divide this election cycle has made clear is that brands should be much more cautious about their messaging for fear of a misstep. “The vibes on social media when brands dip into politics or culture wars are almost always a combination of cringe and divisive outrage,” says Nathan Allebach, social media lead at Ramp, who formerly oversaw Steak-umm’s hugely popular social media presence during previous presidential campaigns.

The negative conservative reaction to Bud Light highlighting a trans influencer in one of its advertising campaigns highlights how difficult it can be to take a stand on any divisive issue. Unilever was also criticized for taking social stances in its product campaigns, with one investor saying, “A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has, in our view, clearly lost the plot.”

“Most people online get fed plenty of politics already, so they often look to brands for escapism into entertainment and the like,” says Allebach. “Coming out of 2020, I think most brands have learned to stay in their lane in fear of failing to ‘read the room.’”

That year proved to be a learning moment for advertisers. “Brands on every corner of every industry were making statements around Black Lives Matter and COVID,” says Allebach. “But the vast majority of them eventually learned this was a mistake, as they had to pivot their content in awkward ways, creating tensions with their audiences as these issues devolved into polarizing culture wars.”

That doesn’t mean brands need to shy away from any kind of social stance or commentary. It’s just that they need to recognize the moment the country is in and acknowledge that there has been a shift, and people need time to adjust. Grand proclamations or attempts to provoke with cheeky creative or irony-laden taglines may be best left for a time when the country is more settled politically.

“The world has changed, and brands that succeed will embrace that change, not avoid it,” claims Elimeliah. “Move forward with purpose, acknowledge the shifts and engage people in ways that speak to their lived experiences, not just their wallets.”