For America250, brands are taking a unifying—and decidedly unpolitical—approach

Some brands are as American as apple pie—and they’ve been hyping as much ahead of America’s 250th anniversary this year.

Brands Anheuser-Busch, Mountain Dew, and John Deere have looked to connect their legacy to American history in campaigns leading up to July Fourth. Others, like Coca-Cola and Chevrolet, have opted for messages that showcase the wide-ranging landscape of the country. Some especially lucky brands, including Budweiser and Jeep Wrangler, have milestone anniversaries that line up with America’s 250th, making it something of a double-whammy celebratory effort.

The variety of America250 campaigns from brands isn’t surprising, but there’s much to consider before a brand shows up during a major cultural touchstone. America’s 250th anniversary comes amid a fraught, politically divisive landscape where brands can easily get into hot water for seemingly innocuous marketing. Beyond that, patriotic symbols that have a newer political affiliation with one party can color the current celebration—making it all the more important for marketers to delicately navigate a moment where campaigns touch on patriotism.

“It’s a delicate line to balance,” David Reibstein, William Stuart Woodside professor of marketing at Wharton, said. “What you want to do is come across being celebratory of America and being pro-America…the balance that firms need to do right now is come across being very pro-American without taking a political stance at all, unless they want to identify their brand with a particular horse in the race.”

Go big or go home

For some brands, representing wide swaths of America was a way to strike that balance. It’s part of the reason Coca-Cola’s America250 spot features footage from “every corner of the country,” Alex Ames, senior director of content and creative excellence at The Coca-Cola Company, previously told us.

For a brand like Coca-Cola, looking back on its history and how it showed up previously for the last major American milestone helped inform what messaging might best resonate now and in the future.

That’s why the brand leaned into messaging about “the timeless values that we stand for—[which] we believe [have] stayed true across America and hopefully for the next 250 years—of being optimistic and coming together as communities, regardless of the backdrop of the country,” Ames said. And of course, the brand revisited its “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” jingle from its incredibly famous 1971 ad.

What’s new is old

While political conversation of the nation may have evolved to be always-on and much more nuanced, according to recent research from Pew, grappling with a political divide isn’t a new problem for the nation—or for brands. In many cases, legacy brands have been here before.

“From a historical lens, [celebrating America’s bicentennial] in ’76, we were coming out of…a really challenging era,” Michael Chavez Booth, founding partner and head of culture at POV Agency, told Marketing Brew. “You had Nixon’s resignation…you had the fall of Saigon a year prior, and coming out of the Vietnam War, oil prices were really high, inflation was really high…unemployment was high…there was this level of public mistrust in the government.”

The difficulties the nation faced at the bicentennial may seem similar—and some have argued wereworse—but the difference today, in Chavez Booth’s opinion, is that at the bicentennial there may have been a sense that the nation was on the verge of getting out of hard times, while today, “we’re in the middle” of it.

That hasn’t stopped many brands from looking backward to find a way forward. To Gene Foca, chief marketing and revenue officer of Getty Images, brands recognizing their places in the history of America “is not a political message,” he said.

“You can celebrate this country and all that it’s about, and your brands in the context of that celebration, without having to get tied up into the politics of what’s going on in the world,” he told us.

That historical context is easier for some brands to lean on than others. Some, like Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, and Jeep, have been part of the American story for decades. Others, like the genealogy brand Ancestry, are all about history, making it natural for an America250 campaign to have a historical focus.

“Every brand has to be authentic to who they are,” Attica Jaques, CMO of Ancestry in the US, told Marketing Brew earlier this year. “This is where authenticity really matters for brands, and whether you should participate in cultural moments. If you can do it authentically, in a way that’s meaningful and actually adds value to your customers, that’s where you should go.”

With that said, a historical approach isn’t something that will work for all brands, and “there’s some of American history that’s not pretty, [so marketers will] want to be somewhat delicate” about what they highlight, Reibstein noted.

“Things that represent Main Street and families, I think those are all things that are pretty safe ground,” he said.

As brands roll out America250 campaigns, there’s some good news on their side: some 66% of Americans say that a brand celebrating America’s 250th anniversary would be “positive” for society, according to MBooth research.