WHAT IS DISBRANDING?
A brand is the emotional connection between customers and a vendor, organization, or politician — not a name or a logo or a product/service. Branding is the discipline of establishing that emotional connection to customers by communicating value to them in their language.
DISbranding is the result of dissing (insulting) one’s customers, the act of intentionally dismantling and destroying that brand, that emotional connection — by employing woke-DEI tactics, thereby dismissing, disregarding, and, therefore, alienating customers. Disbranding differs from debranding (see my branding glossary), which is to mute and dilute the brand until it is indistinct. Disbranding is akin to breaking a golf club over your knee. The brand is dead.
BUD LIGHT
One notable example of disbranding is Bud Light’s use of Dylan Mulvaney, a man pretending to be a woman, to be a corporate spokesperson. Result: Bud Light, of Anheuser-Busch, went from the top-selling beer in America to an also-ran. Michel Doukeris, the CEO of AB InBev, parent company of Anheuser-Busch, still has his job — probably because Michelob Ultra, another Anheuser-Busch label, is now the #1 beer in America.
JAGUAR
Let’s not forget how the CEO of Jaguar, Adrian Mardell, ran his company itself into the ground with the same woke-DEI nonsense. Mardell’s reward for his stupidity? He got fired. In December 2025, PB Balaji, Jaguar’s successor to Adrian Mardell, fired Gerry McGovern, the chief creative officer responsible for Jaguar’s disastrous rebranding campaign. Watch my video below for details.
GLAMOUR UK
A Halloween 2025 example of disbranding is what Glamour UK, a magazine for women, did to its cover and its readers. Glamour’s cover for 2025 “Women of the Year” featured nine men pretending to be women. Imagine being a female reader, learning that a magazine you like thinks men are better women than you are.
CRACKER BARREL
Are CEOs ever going to learn? Some will, some won’t. Julie Felss Masino, woke CEO of Cracker Barrel, decided to remake the entire company, change the restaurants, and create a new logo — introduced to the world on August 21, 2025. The customers revolted. The media exploded with laughter and derision. The stock dropped. Six days later, Masino buckled and reverted to the original — after wasting $700M of shareholders’ money. She should be in the unemployment line. Will CEOs ever learn. Nope. Glenn Beck interviewed Masino and forced her to admit her mistake. And, after a proxy fight, shareholders forced DEI consultant Gilbert Dávila to resign from the Cracker Barrell board.
DEMOCRAT PARTY
In the presidential election of November 2024, Americans ousted the unpopular Democrat Party — infamous for DEI, the climate-change hoax, open borders, crime, violence, taxes, spending, regulations, lawfare, censorship, vax-mask-lockdown-EV mandates, Obamacare, election-rigging, riots, and transmania — to elect Donald Trump. The Democrat Party, once known as the workers’ party, dismissed its traditional base to become the party of leftist elites, unrestricted abortion, men in women’s sports, illegal aliens, and criminals.
Donald Trump won approximately 84.6% (2,633/3,112) of US counties in the 2024 presidential election — including blue Miami-Dade by 11 points, the first Republican to do so in 36 years. He flipped 86 counties that Biden had won in 2020 and lost none that he had carried in 2020, producing the most lopsided county-level map in modern history. Kamala Harris held only the 421 counties that have voted Democratic in every election since 2016 — about 13.5% of the total.
The Democrats, who care only about power and not about America, shut down the government on October 1, 2025, for three cynical reasons: 1) to sow chaos and anger, and increase unaffordability; 2) to ruin Trump’s popularity; and 3) to win the 2026 midterm elections. The Democrats voted 15 times to maintain the shutdown, because they want to continue COVID-era subsidies for Obamacare, which should be scrapped entirely, and to give free Obamacare to illegal aliens.
On October 23, 2025, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-MA, sat down for an interview with Fox News’s Chad Pergram. Pergram asked Clark whom Americans would find responsible for the ongoing shutdown. Replied Clark: “I mean, shutdowns are terrible and, of course, there will be, you know, families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage times we have.” Bingo!
After 43 days, on November 12, 2025, the Senate and House voted to end the shutdown by passing a continuing resolution (maintaining the budgetary status quo), funding the government only through the end of January 2026, and President Trump signed it. What did the Democrats accomplish for themselves? Nothing. What harm did they bring to America? Said Trump: “The Democrats’ shutdown has inflicted massive harm. They caused 20,000 flights to be cancelled or delayed… they deprived more than 1M government workers from their paychecks, and cut off food-stamp benefits of millions and millions of Americans in need.” According to National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, the Democrat-forced government shutdown cost the country about $15B per week and is expected to knock 1-1.5 percent off gross domestic product growth in the fourth quarter.
Except in the leftist precincts of large blue cities (Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, et al), the Democrat Party is very unpopular. At the end of October 2025, according to RealClearPolitics, 59.4% of voters gave Democrats an unfavorable rating. This unfavorability will increase as the Schumer Shutdown (over Obamacare subsidies, which line the pockets of insurers, and coverage of illegal aliens) has lasted 40+ days. According to Welcome, a center-left group, 70% of Americans think the Democrat Party is “out of touch,” disconnected from the issues that matter to voters. Democrats are not seeking to fix their broken brand. Instead, they are doubling down by electing the America-hating, cop-hating, Jew-hating, capitalism-hating Zohran Mamdani — a rich, militant, communist Muslim from Uganda who’s never had a job — as the next mayor of New York City. This is disbranding on steroids.
HILTON HOTELS
On 1/5/26, Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc is refusing to allow ICE and Homeland Security officers to stay in their Minnesota hotels. This will backfire bigtime. Idiotic decision. Branding blunder. Christopher J. Nassetta is Hilton’s CEO. If he doesn’t fire the idiot who made this decision, he should lose his job. Sure enough, Hilton corporate quickly apologized for the actions of its independently owned and operated Hilton franchisee. Then, Everpeak Hospitality, which owns the Hampton Inn Lakeville in Minneapolis, Minnesota, issued a statement on its website that they had “moved swiftly to address this matter as it was inconsistent with” their policy “of being a welcoming place for all.”
On 1/6/26, Hilton Worldwide caught Everpeak Hospitality lying about reversing its ban of ICE officers, so Hilton is removing Everpeak from the Hilton system.