Asked whether it matters to them when a company makes statements about political or social issues, 50% of US adults said very or somewhat important and 50% said not too or not at all important. That comes from Pew Research Center, which surveyed 5,097 US adults in February 2025 through its American Trends Panel. The panel is built from address-based national random sampling and weighted to the US adult population, which makes it the most methodologically rigorous source in this post.
Say more about what you believe, or say nothing about it. Owners get told both, usually by people who sound equally certain, and each of them can point at half a country.
The even split
The more useful part of the Pew finding is what it looks like over time. In July 2020, 52% said company statements were important to them. Five years later, 50%. Within the margin of a survey that size, the country has not moved.
That matters, because advice on this subject arrives with urgency attached. Whatever pressure you feel to speak up or to quiet down, it is not coming from a public that changed its mind.
The rebound, and what it is a rebound from
A different pollster shows a different picture. Gallup, reporting the 2025 Bentley University and Gallup Business in Society survey, found 51% of US adults saying companies should take a public stance on current issues, up 13 points from 38% in 2024. Support rose for all 12 issues tested between the two years. The study was a Gallup Panel web survey of 3,007 US adults in May 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 points at 50%.
Thirteen points in a year is a real move. It is also a rebound off a 2024 low rather than a new high, and Gallup’s own framing says so. Set it against Pew’s flat line since 2020 and both readings hold: a number can drop and recover inside a five-year window that nets out to nothing.
A second Gallup finding gets less attention. Sixty percent of employed Americans would prefer their own employer not communicate a stance to them, which sits oddly next to the 51% who want companies in general to speak. One person can hold both positions, since one is about companies and the other is about their own Monday morning. If you have staff, that distance matters more than any national number.
What people say they will do
Ipsos, in the Axios/Ipsos/CLYDE poll, found 53% of Americans agreeing they are less likely to buy from a company that takes a stand they disagree with. The same poll found 47% who think it is inappropriate for companies to comment publicly at all.
Give that 47% its weight. It is close to half, and it does not sort neatly into people who oppose what you believe. It includes customers who share your convictions completely and still hold that a business is the wrong place to hear about them. Their objection is to the venue.
What they did
The same Ipsos poll asked those same respondents what they had done in the previous month. Thirty percent had stopped purchasing from a company over politics and 30% had reduced their spending. In the other direction, 21% went out of their way to buy from a company because of its stance. The sample was 1,024 US adults on the probability-based KnowledgePanel, fielded 30 May to 1 June 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 points.
So 53% say they would avoid a company they disagree with, and 30% did something about it in a given month, from one poll and one set of respondents.
Stated intent overstates behavior in both directions, and it overstates the upside more. A public statement is more likely to cost you a customer than to win one, and both effects run smaller than a 53% headline implies. None of that tells you whether to speak. It tells you the size of the consequence.
Who acts on it
Both pollsters broke their results out by group. Pew found 66% of Democrats saying company statements are important to them against 34% of Republicans. On behavior, Ipsos found 40% of Democrats had stopped purchasing from a company over politics, against 24% of Republicans. Pew also reported by race: 66% of Asian adults, 63% of Black adults, 63% of Hispanic adults and 42% of White adults said such statements are important to them.
Those are findings about audience composition, and the arithmetic underneath is the useful part. A 50/50 national result averages groups answering anywhere from 34% to 66%, so it describes almost nobody in particular. Your customer list is not a random sample of the United States. It is people within driving distance of you, or within one referral of someone who already trusts you. A national figure tells an owner in one county very little about who walks through that door.
Where those people meet you has shifted too. Constant Contact’s Small Business Now report for Q2 2026 found 49% of consumers globally discovering new small businesses on social media against 40% through search engines. Constant Contact sells marketing software, and its sample of more than 5,000 owners and consumers spans five countries, so read it as direction rather than measurement. The direction is that more first impressions happen in a feed, where a statement of belief and a photo of your work sit in the same column.
Being something is different from campaigning about it
The polls stop here. Nothing above tells you whether your convictions belong in your marketing. What follows is our reasoning, labeled as such.
Operating according to what you believe is a set of decisions: how you handle a customer when the job goes wrong, what you pay, which work you take and which you turn down at a real cost, what you will not publish on a client’s behalf. Those decisions repeat, mostly without an audience, and they are the part that cannot be faked over time.
Making those convictions a recurring theme in your content is a publishing decision, and publishing gets evaluated the way publishing does: reach, replies, argument, the obligation to respond next week. The two activities feel related and behave nothing alike.
We publish a content ethics policy to clients before we start. It says plainly what we will and will not produce. Nobody has to agree with it; they need to know it before they hire us, and then it is settled.
A plain statement of who you are does not need defending every week. A content theme does. It works better as a decision than as a reflex.
The case for making it a theme anyway is real, and we do not get to settle it for you. The 21% who went out of their way to buy from a company because of its stance are not a rounding error, and they tend to be the customers least likely to leave over price. Gallup’s 51% points to an audience for businesses that speak that is at least half the country and moving toward you rather than away. An owner who says plainly what they believe, week after week, is doing the one thing a competitor with a bigger budget cannot copy.
This is also why we treat it as a design problem more than a writing one. Clutch asked 263 US consumers in June 2025 what makes a website feel secure and found an SSL lock icon first at 33%, clean professional design second at 23%, and an About Us page showing the people behind the business last at 2%. Small sample, and it measures perceived security rather than affinity with anyone’s values. It means the About page is not what makes a stranger comfortable typing in a card number. Design does more of that work than most owners assume.
Three questions before you post
Before you publish something values-related, three questions.
Am I describing who we are, or arguing with someone? Description gives the 47% who dislike corporate commentary a way to stay. Argument does not, and it invites a reply.
Are my customers the people in this polling? The national split is 50/50. The subgroups run from 34% to 66%. You know your own list better than any panel does, and if you do not, that is a cheaper problem to fix than a lost customer.
Would I publish this if it cost me the 30%? If the answer is yes, publish it and price the loss in. If you were counting on it to bring people in, the 21% figure suggests the return is thinner than the pitch.
What you believe is a fact about your business, the way your hours and your prices are facts. It belongs in how you operate and in one clear statement people can find when they look. It does not need a content calendar. Most owners we work with did not arrive at their convictions for marketing reasons, and those convictions hold up without being announced.
So write the paragraph. One page, findable in a click from your homepage, saying what you stand for and what you will not do, in the words you would use in the shop. Publish it once and stop revisiting it. If you would rather have an outside read on what that page says about you before it goes up, that is where our branding and graphic design work starts (upliftdigital.io).