Every year, it was the same: March or June would come around, and brands would switch into campaign mode. Colorful profile pictures, manifestos, public statements. For a long time, this playbook functioned almost like a protocol of contemporary marketing — a combination of symbolic alignment, reputation building, and consumer engagement.
In 2025, however, many people noticed something: it simply did not happen with the same intensity. And the data confirms it — this Meio & Mensagem article reports that the LGBT+ Pride Parade itself saw sponsorship revenue fall by 60%.
The easiest explanation is that the market had grown tired of so-called rainbow washing. The more accurate — and far more uncomfortable — explanation is another: diversity became a brand risk.
Recent data from The Conference Board (2025), one of the world’s leading research organizations, shows that S&P 500 companies reduced their use of terms such as “DEI,” “diversity,” “race,” and “gender” in official corporate documents by approximately 30%. Among the largest companies in the S&P 100, the changes have been more structural: 53% have reviewed how these initiatives are organized or communicated, while the share of companies linking diversity goals to executive compensation fell from 68% to 35% in just one year.
At the symbolic level, the shift is equally significant. A 2025 survey by U.S.-based consultancy Gravity Research found that 39% of companies planned to reduce their engagement with Pride that year, while 61% of executives directly cited the political environment in the United States as the primary factor influencing their communications decisions.
In concrete terms, brands such as Bud Light (Anheuser-Busch) significantly reduced their exposure to LGBTQIA+-related initiatives following the conservative backlash against the brand’s 2023 campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Companies such as Target and Walmart also revised their Pride strategies, removing products from stores or reducing campaign visibility following episodes of political pressure and threats against employees.
But this is precisely where the central contradiction of this movement emerges.
While communications are retreating, the business value of these agendas remains widely recognized. McKinsey’s “Diversity Matters Even More” (2023) report found that companies in the top quartile for gender and ethnic diversity in executive teams are approximately 39% more likely to financially outperform their peers. Deloitte’s Global C-Suite Sustainability Report (2024) identified sustainability as one of the top strategic priorities for global senior executives, with revenue generation among the benefits most frequently associated with ESG initiatives.
At the organizational level, the data points in the same direction. Catalyst (2025) reports that 76% of employees are more likely to stay with companies that maintain strong commitments to diversity and inclusion — a figure that rises to 86% among Gen Z workers. Meanwhile, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace (2024) estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy US$8.9 trillion and reinforces the importance of belonging, trust, and leadership quality — factors directly associated with more inclusive workplaces — as key drivers of productivity and performance.
In other words, there is no evidence that diversity has lost its relevance as a business strategy. Quite the opposite. What has changed is the environment in which it operates — and the kind of reaction it now provokes.
A more nuanced perspective can help us avoid oversimplification. American philosopher Judith Butler, one of the most influential contemporary thinkers in gender studies, starts from the premise that identities are not fixed essences, but social constructs shaped by relations of power. This means recognizing that equality does not require erasing differences, but rather creating the conditions for those differences to coexist without hierarchy or exclusion.
From this perspective, today’s discomfort with diversity issues reveals less of an “excess of identity politics” and more of a structural difficulty in dealing with plurality — political, social, and economic. From the standpoint of citizenship, denying or diminishing identities means restricting rights; philosophically, it means falling back on essentialist ideas that have long been widely criticized; and from the standpoint of capital — as the data above demonstrates — it means potentially sacrificing profit.
And yet, despite this contradiction, we are moving toward a scenario of discursive retreat and entering a new phase of corporate communications: the governance of silence. Fewer campaigns, more compliance. Fewer public manifestos, greater legal caution. Less visibility, more internal risk management.
The problem is that this strategy has its limits.
In a hyperconnected environment, absence communicates too. When brands that once took a public stance stop doing so, their silence is interpreted. It may signal prudence, but it can also suggest inconsistency, opportunism, or retreat in the face of pressure.
This brings an uncomfortable question back to the market: was diversity truly a foundational value — or merely a comfortable phase of branding, viable only as long as it came at no cost?
The answer is neither to automatically return to campaigns tied to commemorative dates nor to abandon the agenda as risks increase. It lies in developing a more mature approach to incorporating these issues into corporate strategy. That means replacing occasional celebration with ongoing commitment, symbolic communication with operational transparency, and reactive positioning with structural consistency across culture, governance, and business.
In other words: less performance, more responsibility — or, for those who love corporate jargon, more accountability.
Because in today’s environment, diversity has not become irrelevant. It has simply stopped being easy. And perhaps that is the most decisive — and most honest — test the issue has ever faced within companies.
Ultimately, the question is not why brands stopped painting their logos in rainbow colors. The question is: when diversity began to carry a cost — however inconsistent that cost may be — why did so many companies decide that silence was the best corporate strategy?
Fabrício Bernardes, PR Manager at Textual Comunicação and Master’s student in Communication and Consumption Practices at ESPM
