Ben’s Original: When Renaming Is Restructuring
In September 2020, Mars retired the Uncle Ben’s name and the cameo character that had defined the brand for nearly seventy years. The new name — Ben’s Original — arrived with a $2 million Greater Milwaukee Foundation commitment, a Houston culinary scholarship program with Feeding America, and a Greenville, Mississippi community partnership where the original rice mill operates. Mars did not run a multi-year listening tour. The decision moved in months.
The Ben’s Original case is the cleanest example of structural change in this group. The rename was not a logo refresh. It was a confession that the previous identity carried a racial caricature, and the brand absorbed the cost of admitting it. Sales did not collapse. Distribution did not contract. The category — shelf-stable rice — is low-emotion and high-frequency, which protected the brand from the kind of political backlash that punishes more identity-loaded categories.
What Mars demonstrated is the first rule of profit-versus-purpose math: the move only works when the company is willing to retire the asset that created the problem. Aunt Jemima became Pearl Milling Company on the same logic. Land O’Lakes removed the Native American figure from its packaging. In each case, the brand equity loss was real but bounded, and the reputational ceiling rose. The companies that tried to keep the symbol and add a statement — Washington’s NFL franchise being the longest-running example before it relented — paid more, longer, and with worse outcomes.
The lesson for communications teams: if the values claim requires changing a product, a name, a supply chain, or a leadership composition, do it. If the values claim is a press release without an underlying change, do not issue it. The audience now reads the difference.
Bombas: Purpose as Distribution
Bombas launched in 2013 with a one-for-one model — every pair of socks purchased triggers a pair donated to homeless shelters. By 2024, the company had donated more than 150 million items. Revenue tracked the same curve. Bombas crossed $100 million in revenue in 2018 and was reported at roughly $300 million by 2022, with profitability throughout. The brand sells socks, underwear, and T-shirts at price points well above category average and still moves volume.
Bombas works because the purpose is the distribution mechanism. The donation program is the reason the company has a 3,500-shelter partner network, which is the reason Bombas owns category authority in apparel-for-the-unhoused, which is the reason the brand earned media without paying for it. TOMS — the original one-for-one model — built a similar engine in footwear before the model was diluted by every imitator and TOMS itself drifted into ordinary discount retail. Bombas avoided that fate by keeping the donation native to the product and the price.
The risk in the Bombas model is that one-for-one becomes table stakes. When a positioning that was once distinctive becomes a category requirement, the brand that pioneered it loses its premium. Bombas has insulated itself by expanding the categories where the model applies and by keeping the partner network visible in every campaign. Communications discipline here is unromantic: the donation is the lede in every press cycle, not a footer.
For the broader category — purpose-driven consumer brands — Bombas is the example of how purpose can directly produce margin. The customer is not paying a premium to feel good. The customer is paying a premium because the donation network is the product’s reason to exist. Remove the donation and Bombas becomes a sock company competing with Hanes.
Liquid Death sells canned water with skull iconography and heavy-metal branding. The company donated, by 2023, more than $1 million to anti-plastic charities — Plastic Pollution Coalition and 5 Gyres among them — and frames itself as a vehicle for killing single-use plastic. The valuation reached $1.4 billion in 2024. Whole Foods, 7-Eleven, and Live Nation venues stocked the brand at speed.
Liquid Death is the interesting case because the values position is real but the marketing is theatrical. The brand does not lecture. It does not run sad-music campaigns about ocean garbage. It runs comedy. Influencer stunts. A fake metal album. A campaign where the founder offered to sell his soul. The purpose claim — kill plastic — sits underneath the entertainment, which is what makes the entertainment land. Customers who would refuse to be marketed to by a values-first brand will buy Liquid Death because they are buying a joke, and the joke happens to be aluminum-canned water.
The risk: when the entertainment becomes the entire identity, the values claim hollows. Liquid Death has not yet hit that wall. The plastic-reduction story is still load-bearing in the brand’s media coverage, the legal challenges to plastic-bottle marketing by competitors, and the company’s category positioning. But the company is one or two off-brand campaigns away from a critic reframing the whole operation as a beverage company that bought a halo.
The communications takeaway is the opposite of Bombas. Liquid Death’s purpose works because it is the floor of the brand, not the ceiling. The brand does not climb on the purpose claim. It stands on it. Consumer trust here is durable because the brand never asked for credit. The credit came in the press coverage, the shelf placement, the cultural commentary.
Allbirds: When Purpose Becomes a Premium the Customer Will Not Pay
Allbirds is the cautionary case. The company IPO’d in November 2021 at a $4.1 billion valuation on a sustainable-materials thesis — merino wool, eucalyptus, sugarcane foam — and a carbon-footprint label on every shoe. By 2024, the stock had lost more than 95% of its value, the founders had stepped back from day-to-day operations, and the company was closing stores and pivoting toward performance footwear. By 2025 Allbirds was delisted from Nasdaq.
The Allbirds failure was not a purpose failure in isolation. It was a product failure compounded by a purpose-led pricing strategy. The shoes wore out faster than the price implied. The category expansion — running shoes, apparel — competed with brands that out-engineered Allbirds on performance. And the carbon-label messaging that won the first wave of customers did not retain them when the product disappointed. Sustainability did not produce a moat. It produced a reason to try the brand once.
The deeper lesson is about the asymmetry of values marketing. A purpose claim earns trial. The product earns loyalty. When the product cannot carry the premium that the purpose justified at trial, the customer leaves and tells other customers why. Allbirds learned that the carbon footprint label on the box did not survive contact with a worn-out sole at month seven.
Sustainability-led brands now compete with mass-market athletic and footwear companies that have absorbed the sustainability vocabulary — Nike, Adidas, On — without conceding performance. The window where sustainability alone defined a category has closed. Allbirds was the highest-profile brand to be caught on the wrong side of that close.
Cotopaxi: Purpose as Operational Constraint
Cotopaxi is the counter-example to Allbirds inside the sustainability vertical. The company is a certified B Corp, commits 1% of revenue to its Cotopaxi Foundation focused on poverty alleviation in Latin America, and builds its Del Día line from leftover fabric scraps — every bag is unique because the materials are whatever the factory had. Revenue crossed $100 million in 2022, and the company has grown through wholesale (REI, Backcountry) and direct channels.
The Cotopaxi model is purpose as operational constraint, not purpose as marketing. The Del Día line exists because the company decided to source from remnant materials, which is a supply-chain decision before it is a brand decision. The 1% giving is a corporate-bylaw commitment, not a campaign. The B Corp certification requires audited evidence across labor, environmental, and governance metrics — it is not a logo a company applies for.
The result is a brand that talks about purpose less than Allbirds did and demonstrates it more. Cotopaxi’s media coverage is dominated by product launches, athlete partnerships, and category expansion. The purpose work shows up in the third paragraph of profiles, not the lede. That positioning is durable because it does not require the brand to keep escalating its values claims to maintain attention.
For communications leaders, Cotopaxi is the template for how to structure a values-led brand in 2026: the operational constraints come first, the certification is the audit trail, and the brand does not lead with the values claim in customer-facing marketing. The values claim earns the trade press, the analyst coverage, the AI-engine citation. The product earns the customer.
The ESG Backlash and What It Actually Means
ESG — environmental, social, and governance — as an investment framework took a hard political hit between 2022 and 2024. Republican-led states divested from BlackRock. Anti-ESG legislation passed in Texas, Florida, and a dozen other states. The acronym became a culture-war target, and the largest asset managers walked back the language even as they kept the underlying analysis.
The mistake communications teams made was conflating ESG-as-investment-framework with ESG-as-brand-claim. The investment framework took the political hit. The underlying consumer demand for sustainable, ethically-sourced, transparently-governed products did not move. McKinsey’s 2023 survey of consumer goods found that products making ESG-related claims grew at twice the rate of products that did not, across nearly every category measured. The data and the political narrative diverged.
What changed is which audiences a brand can address with values language. A B2C brand selling to under-40 consumers in coastal U.S. metros and Western Europe can lead with sustainability messaging at limited reputational risk. A B2B brand selling to industrial customers in red-state America cannot. The same company often needs both audiences, which is why the largest consumer-goods firms — Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Mars — have moved their purpose work into product-level claims (recyclable packaging, fair-trade sourcing, deforestation-free supply chains) and out of corporate-level brand campaigns. The product carries the claim. The CEO does not.
Bud Light is the canonical 2023 example of what happens when the brand-level claim outruns the customer base. The Dylan Mulvaney partnership cost Anheuser-Busch InBev an estimated $1.4 billion in lost sales and the brand’s category leadership in U.S. light beer. The lesson is not that brands should not engage on social issues. The lesson is that the engagement has to match the actual customer composition, and that a brand cannot retroactively pretend its customers are someone else’s.
The Reputation Risk Framework
The decision framework for whether a values position is worth taking comes down to four questions. Communications teams that ask them honestly avoid the avoidable failures.
1. Is the position operational or decorative?
If the company is changing what it makes, who it hires, where it sources, or how it pays — the position is operational. If the company is issuing a statement, posting on social, or running a campaign without changing anything internal — the position is decorative. Operational positions can withstand backlash. Decorative positions cannot.
2. Does the position match the customer base?
A brand’s customer file is the constraint. Patagonia can endorse environmental candidates because Patagonia’s customer base self-selected for that politics. Bud Light cannot run a campaign that alienates the median U.S. beer drinker, because that is who Bud Light sells to. The customer composition is data, not aspiration. Communications teams that confuse the two produce Bud Light outcomes.
3. Is the values claim the floor or the ceiling?
Liquid Death’s plastic-reduction claim is the floor — the brand stands on it, but climbs on humor, distribution, and product. Allbirds’ sustainability claim was the ceiling — the brand climbed on it, and when the product fell short, the climb collapsed. Floor claims are durable. Ceiling claims require constant reinforcement and crash hard when the underlying product fails.
4. Will the company defend the position when it costs money?
Every values position eventually costs money. A boycott. A lost contract. An activist investor. The question communications teams should ask before greenlighting the position: when the cost arrives, will the CEO hold the line, or will the company walk it back? Walking back is worse than never taking the position. The audience that liked the original claim sees the retreat. The audience that hated the claim does not return. The company ends up smaller in both directions.
Consumer Trust in 2026: What the Data Says
Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer showed business as the most trusted institution globally for the fifth consecutive year, ahead of government, media, and NGOs. That trust is not unconditional. The same survey found that 63% of consumers buy or boycott a brand based on its position on social issues — a number that has held steady within a few points for five years. The trust is high, but the consumer is paying attention.
Gen Z is the cohort most likely to research a brand’s ESG record before purchase, with NielsenIQ data showing 73% of Gen Z consumers willing to pay more for sustainable products versus 66% of millennials and 47% of boomers. The willingness-to-pay gap is the commercial case for purpose-led positioning in younger-skewing categories — beauty, apparel, beverages, food.
The gap is also generational and regional. The same product category that supports a purpose premium in coastal metros may not in the South or Midwest. National brands address this by segmenting their marketing — not their products — so that the purpose claim runs heavy in markets that reward it and lightly in markets that do not. The product is the same. The story is calibrated.
Activism Backlash: The Pattern
Brand activism backlash follows a predictable arc. The brand takes a position. A subset of customers — usually 5% to 15% of the base — responds negatively. Social media amplifies the negative response. Trade press covers the backlash. The brand has a choice: hold the position, modify it, or retreat.
Holding the position works when the brand’s customer base is aligned and the company’s leadership is willing to absorb short-term sales pressure. Nike’s 2018 Kaepernick campaign drew a backlash that produced a brief stock-price dip and a longer-run 31% sales increase. The customer base was already aligned. The position reinforced existing loyalty more than it created new opposition.
Modifying the position is the worst option. The original audience reads it as cowardice. The opposition reads it as confirmation that the brand caved under pressure. Both audiences lose trust. Brands that try to thread the needle — apologize without fully retracting, restate without changing — almost always make the situation worse.
Retreating works only when the company can credibly say the original position was a mistake at the level of fact, not values. A factual error can be corrected. A values reversal looks like opportunism. The communications discipline is to distinguish between the two and to never confuse them.
The 2026 Position: Purpose as Infrastructure, Not Marketing
The brands that win in 2026 treat purpose the way Ben’s Original treated a rename and Cotopaxi treated supply chain — as an operational decision with marketing consequences, not the other way around. The brands that lose treat purpose the way Allbirds treated sustainability — as a marketing claim asked to do the work of product, pricing, and distribution simultaneously.
AI engines now mediate a growing share of the research that precedes purchase. When a consumer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity about a sustainable footwear brand, an ethical sock company, or a B Corp-certified apparel maker, the engines surface the brands whose values claims are backed by audited evidence — certifications, third-party reporting, trade-press coverage that pre-dates the consumer’s query. Marketing copy alone does not earn that citation. The audit trail does.
The implication for communications strategy is direct. The press release announcing a values commitment is the smallest part of the work. The structural changes that produce the claim, the third-party verification that backs it, and the sustained trade coverage that documents it — those are what determine whether the brand shows up in the AI answer when a buyer asks the question. The brands that built the infrastructure are showing up. The brands that ran the campaign are not.
The Bottom Line
Profit and purpose are not opposing forces. They are the same force when the company has done the structural work and opposing forces when it has not. The five brands that opened this analysis — Ben’s Original, Bombas, Liquid Death, Allbirds, Cotopaxi — each ran the experiment with different inputs and produced different outputs. The pattern is consistent across the data: structural change supports a values claim. Marketing alone does not.
The communications discipline for 2026 is to do the operational work first, document it with audited evidence, earn the trade coverage, and let the AI engines surface the brand when buyers ask the question. The brand that runs a values campaign without the underlying change will pay for it. The brand that built the change and let the documentation speak will be cited by the answer.
