Last year, companies began to pull back from promoting their Diversity Equity Inclusion efforts and social justice activists blamed the incoming Trump administration. It has been a violation of federal law to discriminate for 60 years so to moderates it seemed odd to add a layer of discrimination in hiring, even one deemed positive. And they never considered it may have instead been done at all due to pressure from the previous administration.

The backlash was entirely predictable, but in both cases it was on the fringes. For no benefit, corporate CEOs were ignoring the 'stay out of it unless your customers are dominated by it' mantra.

In the 1930s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer(MGM) studio head Louis B. Mayer was asked why he was not capitalizing on the horror movie craze, "Frankenstein", etc. that had made Universal so much money. He replied, 'Why sell two tickets when I can sell four?' In their case he meant family movies rather than just those for adults but if your product is for both Republicans and Democrats, cheese or booze, it is wise to alienate neither by telling the world you support Hamas terrorists or DOGE or anything else.


The way to do that, affirmed by experiments in 2020 and 2021, is to simply stay out of polarizing political issues.  In a 2020 experiment, Bondi et al. framed the information about companies so respondents knew the corporate stance and whether it is left-leaning, right-leaning, or centrist. In the 2021 version, they included whether the company’s communication of a partisan stance included financial support.

For hot-button issues, they found, a company was not going to win by taking a stand. People who endorsed the behavior of company more were offset by those less inclined to like it.(1) For Republicans and Independents, staying apolitical was beneficial if they expected a company to be partisan. Only Democrats felt it a negative for companies to stay out of politics if they felt the company was politically aligned.

Yet you have to understand your cultural milieu as well. A company in San Francisco is automatically considered far left by most of the country, so they actually benefit from explicitly stating that they are apolitical rather than just being it. And it's okay for a company to be in favor of well-known issues where everyone agrees No one is against clean water, a company can even give money to Nature Conservancy or someone else that cares about clean water, but quite another to promote epidemiology claims that trace amounts of PFAS in water is giving people cancer and Trump refuses to start banning products where science shows no harm.
 
The short version is, if you can sell to four customers, two Democrats and two Republicans, rather than just two, sell to four.

Citation: Bondi, T., Burbano, V. C.,&Dell'Acqua, F. (2025). When (not) to talk politics in business: Experimental evidence. Strategic Management Journal, 46(5), 1105–1119. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3684

NOTE:

(1) Opinions are not dollars, of course, which is why surveys have little real-world utility and this is only EXPLORATORY. There is no way to know if fewer people would buy your cheese based on anything except price or their ideas about quality. Another reason the risk may not be worth it.