You Can't PR Your Way Out of a Brand Problem: What Callaway, LoveSac, and Target Got Wrong

6 MIN READ

Ahh yes, another week, another royal screw-up and subsequent “apology” tour from one company or another, whilst we live through the Groundhog Day of bad brand decisions. Target, LoveSac, Callaway: three different brands in three different industries, all with the same problem (and no, the issue isn’t just a PR crisis). Calling it that diminishes how deep the damage really goes. Bad PR is a symptom of a much larger brand problem: companies are losing touch with who their audience is and what they feel. And that’s not something you can PR your way out of.

Modern brands are losing the plot…

1. Callaway didn’t SEE its audience.

For those who aren't chronically online, here's the recap: Callaway teamed up with the creator brand Good Good to produce a co-branded driver, and the launch ad featured Good Good's Garrett Clark shoving a woman who happens to be a former Division I golfer to the ground for daring to touch his new club. It was pulled within hours, and Callaway's CEO later apologized and admitted the company had pre-approved the whole thing.

Now, was the ad concept objectively terrible? Yes. But did it make sense for their target audience? No, it absolutely did not. Women are the fastest-growing segment in golf, up 45% since 2020. What’s more, women drive the majority of consumer spending, and roughly half of the products marketed to men are actually purchased by women. Think about how much golf gear is purchased as gifts! Father's Day alone brings in a record $27.9 billion, and new drivers are included on pretty much every golf gift guide published ever. 

So this ad wasn’t just a rogue video that slipped through the cracks. We’re talking about a room full of people approving a joke about shoving a woman to the ground, without anyone stopping to consider how it will be perceived by the exact audience their brand most needs to win over. They failed to see how their audience and its values were changing, which is the entire foundation of empathetic marketing. You cannot connect with an audience you haven't bothered to look at.

2. LoveSac didn’t HEAR its audience.

On August 18th, TikTok comedian and dad Deric Cahill posted a video poking fun at the state of his LoveSac couch delivery, which showed up in 24 boxes and took him roughly five hours to assemble. The video was, frankly, hilarious and relatable, and the comments were full of commiserating customers. How did LoveSac respond? We’ll let you guess:

Did they…

A) Apologize and vow to change their shipping process

B) Hire Deric for a collab that joked about how the assembly was worth it for such a dream couch

C) Clap back, mock the guy, and imply that he's less of a man for complaining about the five-hour assembly process

If you guessed C, congratulations. You understand how brands operate in 2026.

But at the end of the day, wretched responses like these stem from bigger upstream brand problems. See, Deric’s video wasn't breaking news. LoveSac customers have been complaining for years about the maddening, multi-box, multi-hour assembly. A brand that actually listens to its customers would have spent that time fixing or, at least, smoothing out the process, so a video like his could never have caught fire in the first place. Instead, they let that frustration sit and fester in their reviews and support tickets until one customer finally said it loud enough to go viral. 

You cannot forge a relationship with your customer base if you don’t listen to them. Empathetic marketing means treating a frustrated customer as someone to understand, not someone to beat. The moment LoveSac chose to defend its ego instead of hearing its buyers, it stopped marketing to its customers and started marketing against them.

3. Target didn’t GAF about its audience.

This past month, Target shelved a kids' Halloween costume called "Glows Under Blacklight Circus Clown.” They marketed it with a photo of a Black child in a dark face covering with an exaggerated, wide grin that everyone with eyes instantly recognized as minstrel and blackface imagery. Target pulled it and apologized, admitting that it "should never have been part of our assortment" and was "especially hurtful for our Black guests."

But a costume like that doesn't happen by accident. It gets designed, reviewed, photographed, approved, and shipped to shelves, passing through dozens of sets of hands, yet somehow no one looked at it and said, “hmm…this is actually horrible??” That's not an issue of one or two tasteless people in the boardroom; it's the inevitable result of whittling your company down to one homogeneous perspective. 

Because empathy, the real kind, requires you to hold your own work up to as many different perspectives as possible, especially the ones that aren't your own. And that is precisely the capacity Target spent 2025 dismantling when it rolled back its DEI commitments. If you strip out the people and the processes who tend to see things you can’t, you’d better be ready to experience the natural consequences of your own actions. Empathetic marketing is, at its core, the act of caring about your customers. A brand that cared would have caught this a hundred times over, but Target didn't. Because somewhere along the way, they decided caring was optional.

Lacking information…or lacking empathy?

Brands today love to play dumb, but all three of these companies had the information they needed to make better decisions. Callaway had the market data on who actually buys golf products, LoveSac had years of reviews saying the same thing, and Target had an entire discipline designed to catch these issues, right up until they decided to get rid of it. What they lacked wasn't information; it was the willingness to care what that information meant to an actual human person.

And you can tell, because every single one of these brands suddenly becomes fluent in empathy when it’s time to apologize for something that happened just 48 hours earlier. All at once, Callaway understands the ad was indefensible. All at once, Target understands the costume was "especially hurtful for our Black guests." They know. They simply can’t be bothered to care until it threatens to hurt their bottom line.

That’s the problem with treating empathy like damage control. By the time you're drafting the apology, the expensive part has already happened. Empathetic marketing is an operating system you build and live by: knowing your audience deeply enough to understand how something will be perceived, and caring enough to act on that feeling even when it's inconvenient. When you invest in these strategies up front, the overwhelming majority of these so-called PR crises never happen in the first place. 

So the real choice every brand is making isn't whether to invest in empathetic marketing or not, it's when. You either build it into your process, the reviews, the approvals, and the values, or you perform it on camera later, at ten times the cost.

If you want to sit out the next Groundhog Day of brand apologies, check out our free Empathetic Marketing Handbook and learn how to build empathy into your brand from the beginning.