Corporate retreat from DEI isn’t smart, it’s wimpish
Brands retreating from DEI in a bid not to offend anybody will soon find themselves irrelevant, writes Jack Richards
In 2025, we’ve witnessed a definitive “Pride pullback” from corporate Britain. According to the UK Pride Organisers Network, 75 per cent of Pride events this year have reported a drop in corporate sponsorship. Meanwhile, data from Onclusive shows that brand and sponsor mentions relating to Pride account for less than one per cent of all social media conversations, an unmistakable sign of retreat.
This cultural shift hasn’t emerged in a vacuum. It echoes broader trends across the Atlantic, where the arrival of the second Trump administration has coincided with a rollback of corporate commitments to DEI and sustainability. But even before this, brand involvement in Pride was under scrutiny. In 2023, Just Stop Oil targeted Pride in London, focusing particularly on its corporate sponsors amid growing accusations of “pinkwashing”. Against this backdrop, many brands now see disengagement as the safest route, stay silent, stay out of the crosshairs.
But silence is not a strategy. Building a brand reputation with the sole aim of not offending anyone is unlikely to generate the resonance or relevance required in today’s fragmented, high-stakes digital environment. Retreating from engagement doesn’t signal caution, it creates a vacuum. And that vacuum doesn’t insulate a brand from criticism, it makes it invisible, or worse, irrelevant.
Saying nothing will get brands nowhere
Of course, audiences today are splintered. The proliferation of, and polarisation between, social media platforms has created echo chambers within echo chambers. Pleasing everyone is impossible. But avoiding all friction is a communications dead end. Brands must walk a fine line: not courting controversy for its own sake, but also not shying away from meaningful engagement out of fear.
Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain and a major sponsor of this year’s Pride in London and Brighton, offers a case study in getting it right. Onclusive’s recent analysis of global brand influence found that Tesco’s DEI communications generated the highest visibility in the UK. By embedding DEI into the operations of the business, Tesco has built credibility and has paired words with action. This not only reduces exposure to pinkwashing claims, and creates a resilient platform that allows it to weather criticism with integrity wherever it may come from.
That’s the real foundation of modern reputation management: not avoiding backlash, but being equipped to withstand it, and in some cases, learn from it. Brands have to act in a way that aligns, authentically, to their values as a brand, and those of their audience.
Today’s online information ecosystem is more unpredictable than ever. In the US, social media has overtaken TV as a news source. Generational divides in media consumption are widening. Even AI tools like ChatGPT are emerging as influential sources of brand perception and consumer behaviour. Such is the ferocity and pace of today’s news cycle that many brands have cowered in its wake, too afraid of inflaming tensions or becoming the next target of the ‘go woke, go broke’ backlash or cancel culture. The question of whether a viral meme is a momentary blip or a signal of deeper sentiment is now a daily dilemma for brands, on top of whether a story in mainstream media will be forgotten tomorrow or run and run.
When it comes to issues of values, such as DEI, passivity simply doesn’t cut it. Not communicating says more than you may think. Silence may seem like the path of least resistance but this year, too many brands took that approach with Pride – and as a result they ended up not just failing to build a reputation, but actively losing ground.
Jack Richards is global head of integrated & field marketing at Onclusive