TL;DR
- 61% of Americans want brands to be taking a stand—but your stakeholders don’t always agree on what that should be.
- Silence is no longer seen as neutral—it’s often read as complicity, especially when values are at stake.
- Communicators must navigate the gap between bold audience expectations and cautious leadership.
- Employees expect public stances to match internal practices; external audiences want proof, not PR.
- Detractors are fast-moving and organized—you need systems, not just statements.
- Cross-functional collaboration is essential to align messaging with behavior and results.
- The PESO Model© is your infrastructure for leading with clarity, managing complexity, and building lasting trust.
Brands Need to Speak Up, But It’s Not Always Simple
A new Gallup poll confirms something many communicators have been managing for a long time: a majority of American consumers want companies to be taking a stand on social issues. But what if what your employees (who are also consumers) want isn’t what your general market customers want? And what if your board of directors wants something else entirely?
Anyone who’s crafted a statement or responded to a social issue knows this isn’t 2000 anymore. Or 2010. Or 2020. Or 2024. The rules have changed. Speaking out today as a brand (or an executive) isn’t as simple as putting out a statement.
With different audiences, varying expectations, societal demands, and organizational priorities, it’s a communications Rubik’s cube where the colors and sides keep shifting. The public is more skeptical, audiences are more fragmented, and leadership is more cautious, but the expectations are higher than ever.
We’ve entered the age of “receipts culture,” where audiences expect proof that you’ve done something meaningful, along with transparency about how you did it. They’re asking questions like:
- Who made this decision?
- Was your leadership held accountable?
- How are you measuring progress?
And communicators are stuck in the middle between audiences demanding bold action and executives nervous about blowback.
This tension raises a crucial question: how do you take a stand in a way that earns trust, aligns with your values, and works across all your stakeholders?
Silence Isn’t Neutral, It’s a Statement
Let’s start with one thing—even if you say nothing, you’re saying something. If your brand is expected to be taking a stand, make a statement, or address an issue, silence can be deafening and detrimental.
For many organizations, the instinct when things get heated is to say nothing at all. That may have worked in decades past, when news moved at the speed of the next news cycle. But in an environment where every second is a news cycle, silence is not perceived as neutrality; it’s seen as complicity.
Falling back on silence, or worse a watered-down statement, carries significant reputational risk. Employees may see it as a betrayal of internal values, customers may shift their loyalty, and advocates may call it out. And let’s not get started on detractors. Those audiences actively targeting your brand and looking for something to sink their teeth into will weaponize it.
According to Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer, 63% of consumers say they buy or boycott based on brand values, and 69% of institutional investors say trust is a “must-have” in evaluating business performance.
That means brands need to earn trust through consistency, transparency, and follow-through. Being silent when your values are on the line creates a credibility gap that can be difficult to close.
Public opinion no longer rewards staying on the sidelines, even if it penalizes brands for making the “wrong” choice. Inaction is a decision, and it can cost you just as much as making the wrong one.
Your Stakeholders Aren’t Aligned, But Your Message Has to Be
Today’s stakeholder landscape is layered, complex, and often contradictory. Internally, you have employees pushing for meaningful change and leaders urging caution. Externally, you have to engage customers who expect action, advocates who expect results, media who expect substance, and detractors who are ready to pounce.
Each group interprets your actions through its own lens. The challenge for communicators isn’t just knowing what to say, it’s knowing who needs to hear it, how they want to hear it, and why it matters to them.
The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer calls out this tension that, while business remains the most trusted institution globally, trust is fragile and unevenly distributed across stakeholder groups. For example, trust in business among employees is driven heavily by perceptions of ethical behavior and internal consistency, while customers rank societal leadership and action on shared values as more important.
This is why audience segmentation and a strategic approach to messaging, content, and engagement are no longer nice-to-haves; they’re essential to communicators. Understanding and aligning with these separate audiences doesn’t mean watering down your response; it means ensuring your values are heard, reinforced, and reflected, regardless of who’s listening.
Communicators Have to Lead from the Center
The demand for companies to “take a stand” may show up first in your inbox or on your brand’s social feeds, but the real response requires more than a message. It requires coordination across the entire organization.
To meet the expectations of today’s stakeholders, communicators can’t operate in a silo. They need visibility into every part of the business that influences perception, from how talent is recruited and retained, to how products are made and delivered, to how decisions are governed and explained.
That’s because every audience judges your brand not only by what you say, but by how your organization behaves. A campaign can’t fix a credibility gap caused by internal inequity. A statement won’t override product or partnership misalignment. A press release isn’t a substitute for meaningful progress.
Communicators must lead the work of aligning brand, operations, and accountability across departments, from HR to legal, from DEI to compliance, from product to procurement. It’s not just about coordinating messaging. It’s about co-creating action that reflects the values your brand claims to stand for.
This is also where communications earns its seat at the executive table, not simply as a department that reacts, but as a strategic function that steers. When communicators are embedded across teams and functions, they’re able to sense risks earlier, identify inconsistencies faster, and help guide the organization toward authentic, credible, and values-aligned engagement.
And this is exactly what the PESO Model was built for—integrating across teams, audiences, platforms, and channels.
So, how do communicators approach this audience complexity with clarity and purpose? The first step is recognizing the distinct priorities, power, and expectations of your internal stakeholders. We’re starting there because if you haven’t earned internal trust, you won’t sustain it externally.
Internal Integrity Fuels External Trust
Employees have become one of a brand’s most influential stakeholder groups, and they’re watching everything your brand does. They don’t just want statements; they expect values to be lived out in how the company recruits talent, treats people, and makes decisions. If your public stance doesn’t match the employee experience, expect Slack threads, LinkedIn posts, or even anonymous media tips to expose the disconnect.
Yet inside many organizations, executive leadership and boards remain risk-averse. Too often, leaders overestimate the threat of public backlash and underestimate the cost of inaction. This gap creates frustration for employees who want meaningful change but all they see is caution from leadership.
But integrity doesn’t stop when you leave the office. External audiences, including customers, advocates, partners, and media, scrutinize whether your internal reality matches your external narrative. Consumers today are values-driven, skeptical, and quick to shift loyalty if they see any inconsistency. They don’t just want polished messages; they expect proof that your brand’s behavior aligns with its words.
Even paid partnerships demand substance. These relationships are no longer transactional but reputational, and stakeholders expect to see genuine alignment between your operations and your public promises.
The underlying theme is an important one–internal integrity is the foundation of external trust. When employees believe in the alignment between what leadership says and does, that credibility naturally radiates outward. When that alignment doesn’t exist, external audiences will expose it, and your reputation will pay the price.
Detractors Don’t Wait for Your Statement, They Wait for Your Slip-Up
While every audience is on the lookout for disconnects between what you say and what you do, there’s one group that treats those disconnects as an opportunity for disruption. Detractors aren’t just a reputational risk; they’re a guaranteed factor for communicators.
This group might include former customers, ex-employees, activist organizations, or politically motivated actors. They are fast-moving, highly networked, and usually ready to amplify inconsistencies.
And they influence more than just comment threads. Detractors surface contradictions that customers might overlook, frame narratives that journalists might pursue, and raise questions that can erode confidence among your advocates and partners.
That’s why communicators have to approach detractor strategy with intention, not fear. You need to anticipate where criticism is likely to emerge, audit your own vulnerabilities, and develop clear escalation protocols that define when to respond, how to respond, and who leads the charge.
Importantly, not all detractors are trolls. Some raise legitimate issues that deserve attention, so dismissing every critic as a hater creates avoidable blind spots. The most effective communicators know when to hold the line, when to listen and learn, and when to adapt.
Ultimately, managing detractors isn’t about defense; it’s about durability, and building systems, structures, and values strong enough to stand up to scrutiny.
The PESO Model© Is the Framework for Trust
We’ve established that “taking a stand” is no longer a statement, it has to be approached as a larger system, and one that must operate across functions, audiences, and platforms in a way that’s aligned, consistent, and credible.
That’s exactly where the PESO Model helps you succeed. It’s not just a campaign planning tool; it’s the connective tissue that brings structure and strategy to all of this complexity. PESO is about integration, not just amplification, and it gives communicators the ability to translate values into action and trust.
Owned content becomes more than messaging; it’s your official record for when your audiences demand receipts. This content serves as the single source of truth you can point to across every audience and channel, and it reinforces what you said, why you said it, and what you’re doing about it.
We all know that earned media isn’t just about PR anymore; it’s about establishing your credibility. When your operations and values are aligned, you’re prepared to engage in meaningful ways with backup that allows you to connect with audiences who demand transparency and access.
Add to that, shared media is no longer the fluffy, feel-good content bucket; it’s your social listening and real-time reputational barometer. It’s where your brand’s values are tested, interpreted, challenged, and in some cases, amplified by others. If your stakeholders, especially your internal audiences, are aligned and empowered, they’ll reinforce your credibility organically, regardless of the platform.
Finally, paid becomes less about reach and more about reinforcement (or amplification) to the right audiences. It ensures your most critical audiences see and understand your content and messaging in the right context and tone. It also gives you a testing ground to gauge sentiment, adjust creative, and refine your approach.
What sets the PESO Model apart for establishing your infrastructure for taking a stand isn’t the components themselves; it’s the way they work together. In high-stakes moments, your ability to stay consistent across each media bucket can make the difference between a coordinated stand and a chaotic response.
PESO helps communicators manage complexity and lead through it, all while empowering teams to sense early risks, surface internal misalignment, pressure test narratives, and ensure that what’s being said publicly is being lived privately.
Turning Complexity into Credibility
The most successful brands in 2025 won’t be the ones that avoid controversy, they’ll be the ones that face it with clarity, consistency, and courage. Sometimes this work gets messy, it’s always nuanced and complicated, and it rarely comes with a perfect roadmap.
Marketers, communicators, and public relations professionals are here to shape language and alignment, and to connect what brands say with how they behave. When you embed the PESO Model into your stand-taking strategy, you build intentionality into every layer. But more importantly, PESO ensures these layers work together, and it prevents your communications from becoming fragmented or reactive.
Taking a stand takes courage. Sustaining it takes strategy. The PESO Model gives communicators the power to align, adapt, and lead—not just through the next statement, but through everything that follows.
©2025 Spin Sucks. All rights reserved. The PESO Model is a registered trademark of Spin Sucks.
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