“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently” (Henry Ford)
In today’s episode, we dive into how major brands like Disney, Southwest Airlines, and Target strayed from their core values and faced the fallout.
The lesson? Staying true to your brand matters more than short-term gains!
This is part 2 of my 5 part series this week!
SOURCES: https://metro.co.uk/2025/12/20/airline-starts-charging-double-plus-size-passengers-25651583/ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/04/target-outlines-plans-to-grow-sales-by-15-billion-by-2030.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2025/12/15/target-withstood-dei-boycotts-to-show-signs-of-reputation-recovery/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
We’re out of the office for a couple of weeks, and so we’ll close out 2025 with some short episodes about the lessons we’ve learned from marketing this year and also the things we need to consider about 2026.
So when I was graduating high school and heading off to college, my grandfather gave me this piece of advice – “don’t forget who you are!”
And unfortunately, we’ve seen some big brands forget this year what their brand is supposed to be about, and they’ve paid a pretty big price for it. The three I’m going to mention are Target, Southwest Airlines and Disney, but it’s a pretty normal occurrence, especially when politics get involved.
Let’s start with Disney, because they seem to have righted their ship somewhat. Earlier this year, Disney, which owns the television network ABC, decided to suspend their late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel over some content from his monologue regarding the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk, who’d been publicly assassinated by a gunman for reasons we still don’t really understand.
Kimmel’s joke was uncontroversial and really not even problematic – he merely suggested that prominent Republicans were trying to distance themselves from the perspective that the shooter was one of their own – and there was no uproar about it.
But Disney bowed to political pressure from the Trump administration and suspended Kimmel’s show a few days later.
And the world went nuts for a bit over what seemed to many people to be a situation of a major corporation censoring free speech to appease the United States government.
I don’t want to get into the whole issue. I’m sure it’s obvious I don’t think Jimmy Kimmel did anything wrong. It’s his job to make jokes about current events, and the joke really wasn’t offensive, worthy of response or even that funny, if we’re being honest.
But Disney is a major corporation with a lot of irons in a lot of fires. Beyond television and movies, they of course have theme parks, a cruise line, streaming services, licensing and merchandise and a whole lot of other businesses, all of which operate at such a large scale that a little bit of controversy can cost Disney big.
And it did, especially in their streaming services Disney+ and Hulu, because subscribers started cancelling both in protest. Disney had already reported seeing 700,000 cancellations earlier in the year due to price hikes, and this was catastrophic given that they’re building their future around a unified Disney+ streaming service that phases out Hulu in 2026.
Social media chatter also suggests Disney saw a lot of cancellations for reservations on its cruise lines and theme parks. Whether this was bluster or sincere is hard to know, but it helped to create a clear PR crisis that resulted in Disney giving Kimmel his show back and, just this month, signing him on for another year.
Their actions seem to have righted the ship. Given that Disney’s Zootopia 2 has already made over a billion dollars and the recently released Avatar: Fire and Ash is doing well despite middling reviews, their film division doesn’t seem to be under boycott.
So let’s move on to Southwest Airlines, a brand I already did a video about. You can find a link to it in the show notes. But to review – Southwest Airlines had a really bad time during the holidays a few years ago, and this resulted in their stock price plummeting, an activist hedge fund buying up a sizable share of stock and taking control of their board.
And though Southwest has long stood for delivering value to its passengers through transparent pricing and perks like open seating, free checked bags and other perks like that, they’re now actively working to function like every other airline and charge for all those services. It’s making their customers and their staff absolutely miserable in the process.
So, have things gotten better in the month since I recorded my previous video? Not even a little bit. Southwest actually just announced it’s going to start charging double for plus-sized passengers, which is a big deal – no pun intended – because they were the only airline not doing that, and their new policy is apparently quite aggressive.
But undermining all that consumer confidence has made one group of people happy – investors, who are seeing Southwest’s stock surge this quarter. And sure, fleecing customers who aren’t used to being fleeced is always a great way to generate short-term profits. But it’s also a way to undermine customer preference and brand equity, which is exactly what Southwest has done in 2025.
And then there’s Target.
And I’m sad to see it, because I love shopping at Target!
Basically, Target has long positioned itself as the slightly left-of-center alternative to middle America’s Walmart, trumpeting its progressive Minnesotan views in how it cares for its employees and communities.
But then, when the Trump Administration took over in January of this year, Target decided to eliminate its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, or DEI, and this set off many communities of color, some of whom decided to call for a boycott.
Now, usually, consumer boycotts are not effective for mass market brands because they don’t really move the needle in terms of spending. But the boycott against Target has actually really damaged the company, and lowering foot traffic during a time in which Target is also facing declining profits due to tariff costs has been a double-whammy for a company that was pledging back in March to boost sales by $15 billion over the next few years.
So, what has happened? The people boycotting Target found alternatives and don’t feel a need to come back. Target’s reputation has suffered and third party monitors such as RepTrak have found that even as Target tries to weather the storm, any short-term gains are going to require sustained focus.
It was all a self-inflicted wound caused by trying to curry favor in a new political climate, and if Target does restore its brand, it’ll still have an ugly scar to remind it about this year’s boycott.
The lesson to learn from this for all three brands is about values, and more specifically, what happens when you decide that short-term success is more important than sticking by the ideals you claim to stand for. Disney is all about free speech and protecting its talent, until it suddenly wasn’t. Southwest Airlines was all about protecting its customers from nuisance fees and aggravation, until it wasn’t. And Target was all about taking care of its staff, until it wasn’t.
And you know, none of these brands are going away any time soon. But their customers might. And there could be a time in the distant future where they wish 2025 was the year they’d stood by their values.
But it wasn’t. I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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