While most business thinkers are debating the next quarter, Doug Stephens is tracking the next decade. A business futurist and founder of Retail Prophet, Doug advises Fortune 100 companies on the forces reshaping commerce, not just technology and consumer behavior, but also the economic and political conditions which determine whether markets thrive or collapse. His latest book, “The Future of Competitive Advantage: A Business Plan to Save Your Customers, Your Company, and Democracy,” makes the case that being a good company is no longer a sacrifice.
It’s the only viable strategy left.
The Worst Business Advice of the Last 45 Years?
We all can agree, business and politics don’t mix and we should keep them apart, right? Well what if in reality, they’re a package deal?
Doug has spent 35 years watching the retail and consumer goods industry debate the same marketing softball questions. Omni-channel commerce. Loyalty programs. Whether a button should be blue. Meanwhile, he says, the world has been coming apart.
“As of 2024, income and wealth inequality had hit a tipping point,” says Doug. “AI is poised to widen and deepen that gap. We had basically priced out an entire generation from the lifestyle that their parents had taken for granted. And the retail industry was still debating omni-channel commerce?”
There was a gap Doug was seeing, between what business was discussing and what was actually happening, which drove him to write The Future of Competitive Advantage: A Business Plan to Save Your Customers, Your Company, and Democracy.
This book is part history lesson, part business lecture, but all backed by credible research and Doug’s experience and centers around a prescient take; the worst business advice of the last 45 years has been to keep politics and business separate.
“I was educated in the school of thought that said one should never mix business with politics,” writes Doug. “I know now that this was dead wrong. I realize that, in fact, the two are not only inseparable but are mutually dependent. Indeed, as one of democracy’s prime beneficiaries, business leaders have nothing less than a fiduciary responsibility to defend democracy and the institutions that uphold it. Because without democracy the free and fair market that our businesses depend on disappears.”
Recently Doug brought his aplomb and that argument to the Marketing Accountability Council’s “Reality Check,” where MAC co-founders Jake Sanders, Jay Mandel, Jessica Smiley, and Moni Oloyede sat down with him for a conversation about where business went wrong and what it would take to go right.
The 45-Year March (In The Wrong Direction)
Doug proves that, after a great boom during the post-war through to the 70s, the downturn started in the early 1980s, when Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics convinced enough politicians that making the shareholder the only concern was the path to extraordinary growth. The promise: wealth would trickle down.
“That,” says Doug, “was just really a load of bullshit.”
What followed was four and a half decades of extraction — from the environment, from workers, from the capitalist system itself. “Constant extraction,” he says. “And we’re kind of at the point where there’s not a hell of a lot left to extract.”
The cost after 45 years of marching are visible: collapsed trust in institutions, a generation locked out of homeownership, a democracy Doug describes as hanging by a thread. None of it is abstract. It is a direct business problem.
“History is pretty unambiguous,” says Doug. “No business can survive long term in a society that’s failing.”
Bud Light, Patagonia, and the Question of Legitimate Footing
Jake Sanders raises the question of politics in business — and the near-universal reflex to keep them separate. When should a marketer or brand bring up politics, and in what way?
Not every brand should weigh in on everything, says Doug — but when they do, the question isn’t whether to engage. It’s whether they have legitimate footing to stand on. He uses two brands to draw the line.
When Bud Light partnered with Dylan Mulvaney and then retreated the moment the backlash arrived, it lost both sides. “They really didn’t have a deeply held, anchored, legitimate reason for bringing it up in the first place,” says Doug. “There was no attachment to core values.”
Contrast that with Patagonia in 2017, when the Trump administration moved to reclaim Bears Ears National Monument. Within an hour, Patagonia had updated their website: The president just stole your land. Within 24 hours, they had filed a lawsuit.
“Environmental protection and public lands — that is a core value of the organization,” says Doug. “They were on very solid footing. I rest my case.”
For council member Moni Oloyede, the Bud Light example is less an outlier than a pattern. “It’s the money at all costs. Revenue growth, shareholder returns — that’s the onus. And I think a lot of companies that were established went away from that.”
The Costco Proof Point
Doug is deliberate about one thing: this book is not meant to be a moral argument.
“If this book becomes a moral soapbox, it’s gonna fail spectacularly,” he says. “There isn’t a CEO in America that’s gonna give a rat’s ass. When you talk to a CEO from the standpoint of morality, they glaze over.”
So he looked for a business case to support the argument in his book. One of the clearest examples is Costco.
For decades, Costco CEO Jim Sinegal paid his employees roughly 42% more than Walmart paid theirs. He offered strong benefits, limited his own compensation, and held the line when Wall Street told him to cut. His response was consistent: “You guys are mistaking what I’m doing here for charity. This isn’t altruism. This is good business.”
The numbers held and continue to do so. Costco runs 8% annual employee turnover. Walmart runs 60%. The downstream cost difference — in recruiting, retraining, lost productivity — is enormous.
“If your employees don’t trust you,” says Doug, “and if they come to work every day believing they are being treated unfairly — I’m not talking about unequally, I’m talking about unfairly — there is no ingredient, no new machine, no new marketing program that will save you. Because those employees will undermine you every step of the way.”
Citing Starbucks as a counterexample lands just as hard. Doug notes that incoming CEO Brian Niccol’s compensation package works out to roughly 6,666 times the average Starbucks employee’s pay. One of Niccol’s early moves: making it easier for customers to tip baristas.
“It wasn’t about paying people a living wage,” says Doug. “It was finding more ways for consumers to subsidize their employees.” He pauses. “Is that fair?”
What Monday Morning Looks Like
Toward the end, Jake Sanders brings it to the practical question: for the everyday marketer, what does all this mean come Monday?
Doug’s answer is about compounding.
“The decisions we make every day — drip pricing, dark patterns in the way we deal with consumers, lying about the quality or performance of a product — in isolation may not seem cataclysmic,” says Doug. “But if this is happening at 100,000 different businesses, that begins to really shape the future.”
Council member Jessica Smiley names the real friction: incentives. “When the incentives align in a capitalistic society,” she says, “truth or good can be incorporated into the money machine. So what does that look like?”
Doug’s answer is that trust and fairness are measurable. 84% of consumers say fair pay is important to them. 77% say it directly shapes their trust in a business. Trust shapes purchase intent. Purchase intent shapes revenue.
“What you will be in a position of having to do,” says Doug, of companies that ignore this, “is nothing but share buybacks until your business goes out of business.”
The book doesn’t end with a moral manifesto, but closes with a 13-page business plan, a set of specific, financially defensible moves. Doug’s argument, and one the MAC council keeps returning to, is that being a good company is no longer in tension with being a profitable one.
“Maybe we look at it from a legacy standpoint, if nothing else,” says Doug. “I have grandchildren. I want to leave a world to them where they can trust their government, work and make a living, afford a decent life — and don’t feel that every corporation is trying to cheat them.”
This conversation with Doug and his book make the case that the future is in our hands; the question is; what will we do with it?
Watch the full Marketing Accountability Council conversation with Doug Stephens above or on Youtube. His book, The Future of Competitive Advantage: A Business Plan to Save Your Customers, Your Company, and Democracy, is available at retailprophet.com and wherever books are sold.
