Business and geopolitics are now intertwined like never before. As a new world order and new trading blocs begin to emerge - still ill-defined - global corporations have found themselves caught in the crosshairs of unclear trade rules and mounting pressure to align with national security interests. Until recently, this geopolitical reality largely sat on the agendas of CEOs and corporate affairs leaders, tasked with securing supply chains and safeguarding the license to operate across regions. But as tensions grow between the United States and the rest of the liberal world, geopolitics is about to become a critical concern for American CMOs as well.
After the Second World War, American brands did not merely sell products to consumers around the world - they offered entry points into a superior way of life and reinforced the bond between the U.S. and its allies. The car, the cigarette, the soft drink: each became a gateway into an American promise of abundance, optimism, and personal freedom. This is what made American brands so globally powerful. Anyone could participate in an imagined America, with brands acting as its essential cultural infrastructure. In this era, advertising and diplomacy were inseparable, and America’s cultural output embodied the ideology of individual freedom and liberal capitalism - the winning promise for post-war generations worldwide.
The apparent inevitability of the American way of life made brand-building relatively easy for American multinationals. Advertising needed only to translate everyday American life into desirable images, and the world would follow. U.S. intelligence agencies and cultural institutions provided massive additional support for consumable American culture: brands, exhibitions, and films formed part of a broader effort to undermine the competing communist bloc by rendering it dull by comparison.
That period of easy sailing is coming to an end. As America seems willing to advance its interests through coercion - even with its closest allies - American brands risk eroding the cultural goodwill accumulated over the past 80 years. This is no small matter. The European Union alone represents a consumer bloc of roughly 450 million people, whose everyday cultural infrastructure seamlessly blends American brands with local traditions, forming a distinctly European condition of existence that has gone largely unquestioned for decades. Yet today, only 16% of Europeans view the United States as an ally that shares the same values, according to a survey conducted in November by the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The first step is to acknowledge that much of their past success has been propelled by the cultural tailwinds of Pax Americana. Second, CMOs must prepare for consumers to quietly disengage in some markets. As Europe seeks new political alignments, patterns of consumption will eventually begin to mirror them. New and attractive cultural imaginaries will emerge from Europe and Asia, and American lifestyle brands risk losing some of their inherited cultural authority. At the same time, domestic competition will intensify, as the idea of European self-reliance extends from politics into everyday consumption and citizen behavior.
For CMOs, this shift also represents an opportunity. They now have both the mandate and the responsibility to act as master ambassadors - leading growth by deliberately defining how their brands show up across diverse global cultural arenas, where reliance on an exported idea of American lifestyle carries real risk. To succeed, CMOs must embed socio-cultural intelligence into their core operating model and clarify which brand equities they can activate to create progress, meaning, and relevance independent of country of origin. They must also use their brand platforms as springboards for innovation - bringing American ingenuity to life in new, locally resonant, and genuinely valuable ways.