The itch every election year brings

Every four years, the feed fills up with brands trying to prove they have a soul. Profile photos change for a night. Founders post statements about issues their supply chain has never touched. Somewhere in a conference room, someone says we can’t stay silent, and nobody stops to ask silent about what, exactly.

We get the itch. 2024 is loud, and quiet can look like fear. But there’s a real difference between conviction and costume, and most of what shows up in a brand’s feed during an election year is costume. Defiance is a discipline inside this haus, not a performance we put on when the news cycle gets hot. It’s a daily practice, built long before anyone was watching, not a reaction to whoever happens to be watching this week.

That’s the whole argument of this piece. The boldest thing a brand can do in an election year is exactly what it was already doing, said a little louder. Not a new opinion borrowed from a debate stage.

What the data actually says

Talk to enough marketers this year and you’ll hear the same fear pulling in two directions: stay quiet and look like you don’t stand for anything, or speak up and alienate half your customers before lunch. Both fears are backed by real research, and it’s worth sitting with the numbers instead of guessing.

The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer’s special report on brand and politics surveyed more than 15,000 people across fifteen countries and found that six in ten buy, choose, or avoid brands based on politics (Edelman, "Brand and Politics"). Eighty-four percent say they need to share values with a brand before they’ll buy from it at all. And when a brand goes quiet under pressure, more than half assume the worst: that the brand is doing nothing, or hiding something (Edelman, "Brand and Politics").

Here’s the part that gets missed. Business is also the institution people trust most to handle this well. Edelman’s broader 2024 report puts trust in business at 63%, the only major institution to clear the threshold Edelman defines as genuine trust, ahead of government at 51% and media at 50% (Edelman, "Global Report"). People aren’t asking brands to disappear from the conversation. They’re asking brands to be honest inside it, on their own terms.

“People aren’t asking brands to disappear from the conversation. They’re asking brands to be honest inside it, on their own terms.”

Harvard Business School researchers Aaron Chatterji and Michael Toffel found the sharper edge of that same coin studying CEO activism. Audiences rarely judge a public stance on its own merits. They read it through the lens of their own politics first, which means a hot take about a news cycle a brand has no real history with tends to convert nobody. It just tells existing customers whether they still belong (Chatterji and Toffel).

That’s the risk nobody prices in early enough. Reactive messaging doesn’t just fail to win new people over. It can cost a brand the people who were already loyal, the moment they sense the stance wasn’t really theirs to make.

Conviction over opportunism

Here’s the line we draw with every client, election year or not: a value has to predate the headline. If a brand has spent five years funding literacy programs and speaks up when education policy makes news, that’s conviction. That’s the brand getting louder about work it was already doing. If a brand has never said a word about a cause and suddenly posts about it the week it’s trending, that’s opportunism wearing conviction’s jacket, and audiences can tell the difference faster than most marketing teams think.

We don’t replace evolving. We replace laziness. Chasing a trending outrage isn’t brave. It’s the easy version of brave, a shortcut that borrows someone else’s fight because building your own, over years, takes longer and costs more. Real conviction is expensive. It shows up in budgets, hiring decisions, supply chains, and community work long before it ever shows up in a caption.

This is also where the specifics of any given election matter less than people assume. A brand doesn’t need an opinion on a candidate to have a spine. It needs a clear, consistent position on the things it has always stood for: how it treats its people, who it hires, what it refuses to cut corners on, which communities it shows up for when nobody’s watching. Those positions don’t need to bend every two years to match a news cycle. They just need to stay true, and get repeated.

What actually defiant looks like right now

Real defiance in an election year doesn’t look like a hot take. It looks like restraint with a spine attached, which is a much harder thing to fake.

“Real defiance picks its own fight. It doesn’t borrow one from a debate stage.”

Practically, that means running every piece of election-year content through one honest question before it ships: have we said some version of this before, in our own work, before this particular news cycle existed? If the answer is yes, say it again, with more proof and less hedging. If the answer is no, that’s not a value. That’s a trend wearing a values shirt, and trends aren’t strategy.

It also means being willing to say nothing about issues that simply aren’t the brand’s to weigh in on, and meaning it, rather than staying silent out of fear and calling it a strategy. Silence rooted in "this isn’t ours to speak on" is a real position. Silence rooted in fear of losing customers either way is not. The difference is obvious to anyone paying attention, and in an election year, that’s everyone.

What we’re telling our clients this year

This is the conversation happening across nearly every account right now, election-adjacent or not. Nobody needs a new opinion invented for November. What they need is the confidence to keep building on the line they already have, and the discipline to leave the borrowed fights alone.

Safe doesn’t survive here, and neither does a brand voice that changes with the polling numbers. The brands that come out of an election year stronger are the ones nobody could tell were nervous, because they never stopped saying what they’ve always said. That’s not caution. That’s the harder, better kind of bold.