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Notes -
Seems like a high variance strategy, to be honest.
Because it turns out that it isn't easy to predict in advance which side might take offense to a particular stance and how the public opinion on certain issues might shift over the course of a matter of years. It would seemingly take less effort to stay in the middle of the road than to correctly determine which extreme will produce more revenue for you.
And it certainly seems more sensible to build a reputation of "they produce quality [product] and provide good service" than "they have an agreeable stance on [issue] so I don't mind poorer quality or service." Since the former can be kept consistent, the latter maybe not.
But more to the point, I don't see why executives, acting in their capacity as executives, should be expected comment on purely political matters if their company or the broader industry isn't directly implicated or effected by said matters. This seems like a situation where there is ONLY downside to be had.
And I'm focusing my critique here on so-called 'publicly-traded' companies since as the name implies their interests are not bound up in a single person or small group of people who suffer directly for their decision making. There's a near 100% chance that their shareholders come from across the political spectrum and have a huge panoply of personal views that it would be impossible to account for when setting out the company's actual stance on a given issue.
And, likewise, they owe all those shareholders a duty to try to maximize shareholder value, and if they lose revenue through taking a stance on a political issue that they didn't have to comment on at all that seems like a dereliction of that duty.
So it really beggars belief that execs who are nominally accountable to shareholders would:
A) Active risk offending said shareholders' personal beliefs, to the extent those beliefs are irrelevant to the company's business anyway (i.e. an oil company will always offend an environmentalist).
B) Actively risk their company's existing revenue streams for SMALL potential gains in marketshare or popularity. There's just no way that picking a side in a culture war battle is a winning strategy when you're already in a near-dominant position.
I have yet to hear an actual consistent explanation for why giant companies need to set out a legible political stance at all, other than "if we don't then activists might get mad at us."
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