Why everyone hates everyone, especially your giving program
Vague mission statements and ambitious social programs are overly risky in the 2020s. Time to get focused, get emotional and tell stories.
This is a bad time for everyone. Tech companies used to build for everyone, governments served everyone, people approved of everyone, the planet belonged to everyone. Then, from 2015 and 2022, everyone took a steep dive in reputation and an increasingly powerful coalition of people decided to take down everyone. Barely anyone wants to be everyone's friend.
Mission statements that worked in the optimistic 2010s are failing in the polarized 2020s. Populism is a mood first and a policy second, and the mood of most corporate-giving programs is violently at odds of the time. The ultra wealthy and a lot of the working class share a single defining emotion: they feel isolated, they feel unsafe and they are sure everyone is against them. Most Americans preferred Biden/Harris’s policies in 2024 and yet Trump reached low-attention voters without policies and with emotional language about decline, immigrants and inflation. Having reached these voters, he has since shocked them with his actions. He remains the best comms proof that you can have the best ideas and lose to someone with none. Being right will give you 10% of what you need to change anything. The rest is comms.
This is an age of expressive voting, where you vote to detonate the house rather than give someone you despise an inch. In French parliamentary elections, the further left couldn't bring themselves to vote for the center in three-way races, handing Marine Le Pen more seats. In two-way races between the far-right and the centrists, they happily voted centrist. The ones who voted against their best interests were expressing themselves—their vote gave them the basic human pleasure of having your voice heard.
The rational approach to emotion
When there's strong consensus and trust, your passions and earnings barely conflict. During polarization, they conflict constantly, and people choose what feels good now over vague benefits tomorrow, especially when they get to deliver an enormously satisfying fuck you.
My colleagues and clients in the logical corporate world tend to roll their eyes at this behavior in elections. Then they spend months analyzing why well-meaning programs either fail to cut through, or backfire. Even my cynical self has felt a rising shock as bland corporate messages go beyond testing poorly, they actively polarize. People either love them or hate them – all within the same target audience. Bland statements of values had one thing going for them in the 2010s: they were useless but harmless. Now, by being vague, broad, unemotional and ill-defined they carry a real risk of pissing someone off. None of this will appear in traditional comms measurement, where the tone is likely to seem positive or neutral even as you infuriate a section of your target audience until they burst.
If you want to understand the public's probable reaction to your corporate values without wading through polling, message-testing or political science, then do what I did. Raise siblings for ten years.
How to split a cake like a sibling
God forbid my sons ever receive slightly different gifts. They seem OK at first, but an underground river of lava builds and explodes ten years later while I'm making coffee. "I remember when you gave him cake but me a candy bar," they say, as if it explains everything wrong with the universe.
They see free cakes as a challenge. Either eat the whole cake before your brother does or, if you can't ensure the split is 100% even, throw the cake away so everyone gets a fair share of nothing. That's how rising numbers see your corporate mission: the more it's for everyone, the less it's for them. Sibling game theory is now the emotional reaction to most public policy.
This has a clear emotional logic when you think about the vague way corporations use the word “everyone.” It is never quite everyone. In a time of optimism, the mission statement felt like “We will do this for everyone at some point.” Now the emotional response is: “Someone will be served first. Who is it? And why don't you say?” Who exactly are these vague millions? How many immigrants are in those billions? Where is my slice of the cake in that $100m economic impact?
The populists on the other hand say exactly who they are with and why. They express it consistently, emotively. The result is a Great Emotional Deficit between corporate responsibility programs as conceived by my optimistic generation and the visceral narratives of populists today obsessed with a vague "them" coming for the specific "you."
Justice and economics < stories and freedoms
Abstract moral obligations simply don't play. The Clintonion “kitchen-table economics“ of the 1990s need an update through a loose set of activities that I think of as "kitchen-table freedoms.”
These are concrete, tangible benefits that people feel as expressive happiness: parenting well, great family conversations, building security, feeling certain, being on the right path, seeing new things, enjoying old things forever. These are not quite economic benefits, but they are closely tied to them and they allow corporations to give their audiences pledges that the audiences can feel in their bones and in which they can see a happier future. To be emotional, these pledges also need to be specifically for someone, and therefore not for someone else. This is a hard muscle to build for consensus-driven comms people, but in a world without consensus it is the only power that counts.
The freedom to stay where you’ve always lived
I think shock New York mayor candidate Zohran Mamdani, as a communicator, is the perfect example of how this works, for even a hard-left message. He powerfully defended New Yorkers’ “Freedom to Move.” Instead of lecturing about public transit funding, he championed a free bus pilot as "easy, dignified transit." Mamdani loved that ridership on fare-free routes was 30% higher in a pilot test, even as technocrats saw it as a failure. Here was a powerful unifying story of low-income riders who suddenly discover they have permission to exist in their own city.
He said exactly who he was for: people who ride buses. Who was he against? Basically anyone who didn't. Even plenty of people who didn't ride buses could imagine themselves delightedly taking a bus for free, and they were a much larger population than the people who would never ride a bus (cough, millionaires, cough). Trump, of course, did the same by focusing on congestion charges for people outside of the city: why should the scorned bridge and tunnel crowd be forced to pay for the buses of those snooty city folk. The structure becomes clear. Who can you reach? What activity unites them or defines them as a group? How do you make that activity easier? There is no need to over explain economic impact when people think of you every time they feel the sting of a rising bus fare.
When applied to my own area – corporate comms – there are serious trade offs to being more specific that politicians don't face (politicians can win everything by pissing off 49% of the people, businesses can't). Still, the center-left's emotional deficit offers a masterclass in what not to do—and what to get right.
Make one tough choice, and the rest is easy
The smartest communicators I speak to are thinking about specific people more than inspiring words. Being strategic about whom you benefit at least lets you pick who you piss off. Others who don't pick can get blind sided by surprise boycotts. Across conversations with peers who work on previously popular programs, I have found that those who've squared this circle have begun to unlearn Davos-style declarations of saving the planet, society, or truth. Instead, they pay the price of clarity to get the benefits of clarity.
Here's a start to a new corporate responsibility playbook, distilled from both failures and the successes I've seen over the past year. Everyone is out. You are in. You are not everyone.
Stop Leading with Abstract Good: Don't open with "We're committed to sustainability" or "We believe in social justice." These trigger the same emotional shutdown as "we're all in it together." Instead, lead with concrete benefits: "We're making sure your commute costs less" or "We're protecting your neighborhood from flooding." On a national level, the same corporate benefit is framed and reframed according to the national priorities of the time. The benefit is consistent, the frame changes. This is a different route from picking the value and then trying to fund some benefit, which was what a lot of brands effectively did in the 2010s.
Name Your Beneficiaries: The most successful programs I've encountered have abandoned the everybody-wins rhetoric. They clearly identify who benefits and why. A tech company's digital literacy program doesn't "bridge the digital divide"—it "helps local parents navigate their kids' online homework." Specificity beats universality every time. If the specific happens to connect with what a powerful regulator loves, so much the better.
Make It Personal, Not Planetary: Environmental programs that work don't start with polar bears; they start with your heating bill. Financial inclusion programs don't begin with inequality statistics; they begin with "skip the check-cashing fees." The emotional hook has to land in someone's daily life before it can expand to systemic change.
Embrace Strategic Modesty: The programs that survive political shifts make more modest claims than they might have ten years ago—but they make claims that actually land. They've learned from the center-left's mistake of promising everything to everyone. Better to clearly help 1,000 people than to vaguely help humanity.
Test for Emotional Resonance: Before launching, ask: Does this sound like something people would fight to keep or repeat in conversation? If your program disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice beyond the quarterly report? I recently asked Google.org’s Annie Lewin for advice on whether I should recommend restructuring a company's fragmented corporate responsibility programs. Her response: the branding or the structure matter less than the stories they produce, and your added comms value will be maximized by pulling stories out of them. This maps to panel measurement tests I have run, where messages that logically resonated had no emotional impact, while stories triggered identifiable but subconscious emotional reactions in the target audience. Guess which correlated most closely with a change in opinion? The fluffy thinkers in corporate and political comms are the ones who dream of data winning over minds, let alone hearts.
Corporate responsibility programs can learn from both Trump's success and the center-left's struggles: clarity beats complexity, specificity beats solidarity, and emotional truth beats abstract virtue. Telling the story of someone your audience relates to is worth a thousand position papers landing as PDFs in the unread folder.
The cake doesn't have to be thrown away. It just needs to be served with the right story about who baked it, who's trying to steal it, and why you will get your slice—whether you're designing voter outreach or community programs.