Red/Blue split for consumer products
It certainly seems like the US has become more polarized politically over the past few years, and that the political polarization has extended into the world of business. You get movements to boycott general businesses which are advertisers because they sponsor a certain non-profit or show, or to boycott advertisers because they’ve stopped supporting a certain non-profit or show, and the threshold for “collective action” seems to be decreasing. Sometimes it’s just “boycott X because an employee said something we don’t like on Twitter”, sometimes there’s even less basis than that. Overall, it’s pretty scary for high-volume brand.
As well, there’s money to be made selling commodity products with “political” branding. For some products, the product itself does have some tie to a group, activity, or community — it’s hard to buy guns from anti-gun companies. Some products aren’t as inherently tied, but are highly correlated — lots of natural food/etc. stuff has a “yoga” branding (broadly left, at least culturally), and lots of outdoor sports stuff is “dudes on ATVs with beards and rifles” associated. Some are highly culturally/identity tied historically and now, like music and art. (To say nothing of wedding cakes going before the Supreme Court as a free speech vs. minority protection issue…)
There are also pure message/identity based goods, where the underlying product is just a blank slate for a message. This used to be t-shirts and stickers. Now it’s unrelated commodities like coffee (!!!), where much of the “value” is the branding, and that branding is now largely about the political message and support.
People are somewhat too sophisticated and pro-research to just buy “red” vs “blue” product from the same company — I’ve seen people look into the donation history of founders, executives, and employees, geography of headquarters, etc. It’s possible for some businesses to remain neutral, but not these political branding focused businesses.
I suspect this is going to intensify, and there will be a new market for completely bland commodity suppliers who stay entirely in the background (or, who set up multiple parallel supply chains without common entities), selling to these explicitly branded/political entities. These entities will be largely commodity resellers and focused on brand, although some of them might make product decisions, and in some industries, might actually drive product innovation themselves (I would be excited to see right wing “whole foods” products and left wing firearms and self defense companies and what they do.)