Reputation is the new ROI

Picture this: you’re a brand manager, quadruple shot latte in hand, doomscrolling through your brand's mentions on social.

And boom, somewhere between the next trending song and think piece, your campaign, logo, and product are all being reinterpreted, misquoted, and memed into oblivion.

One side’s calling you brave. The other, brainwashed. And somewhere, your CFO has the cheek to ask if any of this outrage is “driving conversion.”

This is the modern branding landscape as we know it—part marketing plan, part freaking minefield.

One misstep, and boom, baby.

Every post is a potential scandal. Every influencer is a political statement. Every colour palette can be a provocation. We’re no longer selling jeans or beer or even fkn breakfast anymore; we’re selling alignment, morality, and meaning, whether we like it or not.

Reputation used to be something brands could manage. Now it’s something literally everyone else controls.

This is what I mean when I say reputation has replaced ROI.

ROI was built for a slower world, one where campaigns lasted months and consumer sentiment moved at the speed of Nielsen data. But we don’t live there anymore.

Today, your reputation refreshes in real time. One creator’s critique, one Reddit thread, one slightly too earnest Pride post, and boom, your quarterly strategy is obsolete. Because right now, the market doesn’t trade in money first. It trades in meaning.

Bud Light, Cracker Barrel, and American Eagle all learned that the hard way.

We all remember when Bud Light unintentionally turned marketing into moral warfare. This was kind of the start of the recent brands-as-ammo in the never ending left-right tug of war.

The collaboration with Dylan Mulvaney was supposed to be a small influencer activation, a moment of cultural relevance, maybe even progressiveness. Instead, it became the defining case study in what happens when your brand gets caught in America’s political crossfire. Spoiler: you make a whole mess.

The partnership sparked a conservative boycott, a progressive backlash against the brand’s backpedalling, and months of memes, mockery, and moral panic. Bud Light totally lost control of its narrative. And the craziest part is that the product didn’t change. The beer didn’t taste any different, but the meaning of drinking one totally did.

That’s what modern reputation looks like: a battle over who gets to define what your brand stands for.

The same happened with Cracker Barrel. The poor restaurant chain didn’t ask to join the culture war. A logo refresh should’ve been the most harmless thing imaginable—a little flatter, a little sleeker, a little more 2025.

But the internet saw it differently. Within hours, conservative commentators were calling it “woke,” “soulless,” and “the death of Americana.” Entire threads popped up accusing the chain of abandoning its roots. Even Trump weighed in, lamenting the fall of the good old Cracker Barrel he once knew.

All this… over a font.

Cracker Barrel didn’t launch a social justice campaign or paint rainbows all over the place. They didn’t change their menu. They just updated a logo, and somehow, that became a referendum on cultural identity.

It’s the perfect example of how fragile brand perception has become. A freaking design choice became a political statement. In today’s polarised landscape, even a serif can start a civil war.

And that leads us to the latest in the saga, American Eagle.

Sydney Sweeney was supposedly a safe bet for American Eagle. She's Gen Z’s blonde bombshell sweetheart, Euphoria-famous, maybe a little edgy, sure, but still the picture of the American Girl Next Door. Perfect, right?

Wrong.

Celebrity isn’t apolitical anymore. Every famous face carries a reputation portfolio of their own: family politics, brand partnerships, fandom allegiances.

So when Sweeney’s on-screen script (and off-screen associations) rubbed parts of the internet the wrong way, American Eagle’s campaign got caught in the crossfire. A denim ad turned into a referendum on class, privilege, and performative coolness.

It wasn’t just that the creative was bad. It’s that celebrity culture has become proxy politics, and brands keep forgetting that.

Every one of these brands proves that reputation is no longer a soft metric. It’s the market itself.

• Visibility = volatility. The bigger your platform, the smaller your margin for misinterpretation.

• Values = currency. Consumers buy what aligns with their worldview or boycott it if it doesn’t. Simple as that.

• Virality = volatility squared. The faster something spreads, the faster it spirals.

Reputation used to live in PR. Now it lives in public discourse. It’s co-authored by consumers, creators, and comment sections in real time.

So, if we can’t measure "return" the old way, maybe it’s time to rewrite what the “R” even stands for.

• Return on Integrity: Are your actions consistent with your stated values?

• Return on Intention: Are your moves strategic, or reactive to outrage?

• Return on Interaction: What’s the quality of your relationship with your audience, not just the quantity of your impressions?

• Return on Identification: Do people see themselves in your brand, and want to be seen with it?

These aren’t metrics for dashboards. They’re measures of trust.

The modern marketer’s nightmare isn’t being ignored. It’s being interpreted.

Because in the economy of perception, you’re no longer selling a product; you’re selling a worldview. Every campaign, every collab, every piece of content is a referendum on your place in the cultural spectrum. And that’s a scary place to be.

When outrage compounds faster than interest, reputation isn’t just part of your ROI. It is your ROI.

-Sophie Randell, Writer