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Like our favorite celebrities, brands aren’t perfect. Bad PR is a part of life because people aren’t perfect and the companies they run follow suit. Recently New Balance became the first company to publicly back Donald Trump, a very divisive figure for reasons you would have to be sleeping under a rock to not know already.
Priding themselves on being a brand that develops their products on American soil, New Balance saw Trump’s election as an opportunity for business growth and one that would bring more jobs to Americans. However, that is their opinion and not some universal truth.
Politics is a tricky place for a brand to choose sides when there are so many issues that people take seriously. Thousands of sneakerheads were outraged at New Balance’s political stance. So outraged that they denounced their love for the brand all over social media by literally posting pictures of them throwing the sneakers away and burning them. Things really spiraled out of control when neo-nazis procclaimed the sneaker to be the official sneaker of white people. Yes, that really happened.
Obviously publicly backing a divisive president-elect has some serious downsides with the public, so what do we do as consumers after our favorite brands choose to do something against our personal values?...
The election of Donald Trump has shown that politics and brand marketing are bad bedfellows.