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We're in your inbox a little later than usual today — we're just coming back from supporting The Black Beauty Club’s Eid Celebration. More on that soon!

We're excited about this edition because we're bringing some conversations we've been having among peers to the community. People are paying closer attention to where their money goes, and they are acting on what they find. Brands that built their reputations on bold commitments are being held to them. Brands that made those commitments decoratively are finding out what happens when the audience notices the gap. This edition is about that moment.

Inside, we also break down the Sinners campaign, a masterclass in what long-game PR actually looks like. We look at what Lush did this week and what it tells us about the difference between activism as a campaign and activism as infrastructure. And for our Inner Circle members, we get into the numbers behind Target and Costco, a framework for counseling clients on when to speak and when not to, and the full Lush case study.

Community Corner this week features someone who has been building at this intersection of culture, narrative change, and communications for her entire career. We are glad to spotlight her.

Let's get into it.

With love and intention,
Fatou & The PRGM Post Team

Every edition, we’ll share the articles, essays, and industry reads that have been living in our heads lately

PRGM has always been built around one idea: that PR and communications professionals deserve better resources, sharper analysis, and a community that takes the work seriously. The Inner Circle is how we plan on delivering on that fully!

Every issue of The PRGM Post will have two layers. Free content that's worth your time, and Inner Circle content that goes deeper: complete case studies, cultural analysis, strategic frameworks, in depth conversations with industry leaders, feature opportunities and first access to everything PRGM builds next.

The Inner Circle is $8/month. And this edition is a good place to see exactly what that gets you.

Something has shifted in how people are spending their money, and it isn't just about price.

Consumers have always been price-sensitive. That's not new. What's new is the layer of intention sitting underneath the purchase decision. In 2026, people aren't just asking "can I afford this?" They're asking "should I support this?" And increasingly, those two questions are carrying equal weight.

The data reflects it. According to NIQ's Consumer Outlook: Guide to 2026, the global shift from cautious to intentional consumption that began in 2025 has deepened. Consumers are financially steadier than they were a year ago, but psychologically guarded, and that guardedness is showing up not just in how much people spend, but in where they spend it and who they're willing to reward. Nearly 35% of consumers say the past few years have taught them "less is more." The impulse aisle is giving way to what researchers are calling the "informed aisle", 45% of consumers now make shopping lists before heading to stores, 44% plan their spending in advance, and 37% compare prices between brands before deciding (NIQ, 2026).

But this isn't purely an economics story. It's a power story.

In a moment defined by uncertainty: political, economic, and institutional, the spending decision is one of the few levers most people can actually pull. Boycotts have always existed, but what's happening right now feels different in scale and staying power. According to the Kearney Consumer Institute's Q2 2025 report, Weighing Value with Values, 51% of consumers stopped shopping from brands that did not align with their values over the past year. That isn't a fringe behavior. That's a majority. And it's happening across demographics, income levels, and political affiliations in ways that don't map neatly onto any single narrative.

What it maps onto is something simpler: people have decided that their dollar is a vote. And they're casting it deliberately.

The Friction Argument

For the better part of a decade, the dominant philosophy in consumer experience has been frictionlessness. One-click purchasing. Same-day delivery. Subscribe and forget. The idea was that removing every obstacle between desire and transaction was the highest form of service, that the best brand experience was the one you barely noticed.

That philosophy is being quietly challenged right now. Not because people don't value convenience, they do, and they always will. But because a growing number of consumers are discovering that friction, in the right context, carries meaning. The deliberate choice, the one that requires a slight detour, a slightly higher price, a conscious decision to support one business over another, feels different from the automatic one. It feels like agency.

This is the tension that the most interesting brands are navigating right now. In a market where nearly 35% of consumers say the past few years have taught them "less is more," people are gravitating toward brands that reflect simplicity, stability, and purpose, not just the ones with the smoothest checkout experience (NIQ, 2026). Frictionlessness built loyalty through habit. Intention builds loyalty through conviction. And in a moment when consumers are paying closer attention than they have in years, the brands whose values are legible, whose behavior consistently matches their messaging, are the ones being rewarded.

The ones whose values turned out to be decorative are finding out the hard way what happens when the audience is paying attention.

Sinners was always going to be a cultural event. Ryan Coogler directing an original film. Michael B. Jordan in dual roles. A story set in 1932 Mississippi, where blues music and vampires collide as a metaphor for racial terror. The bones were there. But a great film and a great campaign are two different things, and what Warner Bros. and Proximity Media built around Sinners, from its April release through its record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations, is worth studying as a masterclass in long-game PR.

The movie opened April 18, 2025, to $48 million domestically, the biggest debut for an original film since Jordan Peele's Us in 2019. It would go on to gross over $370 million worldwide against a $90–100 million budget. But the box office number isn't the story. The story is how they kept Sinners alive, culturally, critically, and institutionally, for nearly a year.

The Campaign Started with Controlled Withholding

One of the most discussed decisions in the Sinners campaign was what Warner Bros. chose not to show. The first trailer dropped in September 2024 and didn't make much of a splash. The vampires, the supernatural hook at the center of the film, were held back entirely, saved for a second trailer that debuted during the NFL playoffs in January with a teaser that reached over 50 million viewers. That decision to hold the most provocative element for a premium placement moment wasn't timidity; it was sequencing. By the time audiences understood what kind of film Sinners actually was, they were already locked in.

The early review embargo lift, about a week before opening, on April 10, was the campaign's secret weapon. The critical consensus arrived before the general public had made up their minds, and it gave the film cultural permission to be taken seriously as both entertainment and art.

The Creator Strategy Was Platform-Native, Not Repurposed

The campaign didn't treat creators as an add-on to the traditional press tour. It ran both tracks in parallel and made distinct content for each platform rather than repurposing the same assets everywhere. Hot Ones Versus with Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld drew 4 million YouTube views. The cast's grillz moment at the London premiere spread natively on TikTok in ways polished trailers rarely do. From October 2024 to July 2025, the film generated 77.1 million TikTok video views and 152,000 shares.

The difference between creator strategy that works and creator strategy that doesn't is usually platform specificity. Sinners understood this.

The Second Weekend Told the Real Story

Opening weekends are largely a product of marketing spend and timing. Second weekends are a product of whether the film actually worked.

Sinners dropped just 6% in its second weekend, earning $45 million, the smallest decline for any R-rated film on record, per The Hollywood Reporter. What the audience composition data revealed was equally significant. In week one, women made up 43% of the audience. In week two, that flipped to 56%. The under-25 demographic jumped from 20% to 34%, and Asian American attendance nearly doubled — from 6% to 11%. The film hadn't just retained its opening audience. It had found entirely new ones.

The Long Game: Reentry, Coordination, and Multiple Doors In

When Sinners returned to IMAX theaters in October 2025, Warner Bros. coordinated the announcement with news that Ludwig Göransson's original songs had been submitted for Oscar consideration. Two pieces of news, timed together, each reinforcing the other. The theatrical return kept Sinners in conversation with general audiences. The song submissions kept it in conversation with Academy voters. Both generated press coverage that neither would have earned alone.

What sustained the campaign through ten months of press was that the team gave journalists and commentators multiple entry points into the same story. The craft angle lived in film publications: Autumn Durald Arkapaw becoming the first woman to shoot on large-format IMAX, Kodak creating a custom film stock for the production. The cultural angle lived in Black media: the Delta blues setting, the conjure traditions, Black Southern spiritual history treated as scholarship rather than backdrop. The business angle lived in trade press: Coogler's deal giving him first-dollar gross and ownership reverting to him in 25 years. The partnership angle lived in profiles: Zinzi and Ryan Coogler co-producing under Proximity Media, framed as a deliberate operating model, not a novelty.

One film, many doors in, and each audience found something that felt like it was made for them.

The Takeaway

The Sinners campaign is a reminder that longevity in PR requires architecture, not just energy. It happens when a team sequences its moves deliberately: withhold, then release. Generate cultural heat, then convert it to institutional recognition. Use the theatrical experience as the argument. Give the story enough entry points that different audiences can find their way in.

Lush launched its United Bath Bomb campaign across all US stores, a fundraising product supporting immigrant rights organizations, in partnership with the ACLU, Mijente, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Store windows were transformed with the message "United in the fight for immigrant rights. Know your rights and freedoms." Free Know Your Rights pamphlets, covering everything from immigrants' constitutional rights to protesters' rights, are available in stores through March 22nd.

It's worth noting that Lush declared all US stores ICE-free zones in 2020, and that designation never ended. This week's campaign isn't a pivot. It's a continuation.

Simultaneously, across 101 UK stores, Lush is running a parallel campaign with Migrants' Rights Network, featuring a Hand of Friendship bath bomb with 75% of proceeds going directly to the organization. Two countries, two campaigns, one position — expressed through the product, the store, and the partnership, not a press release.

That consistency is the story.

Inner Circle members get the full strategic breakdown below. 🔒

Each edition, we spotlight a member of the PRGM community doing work worth knowing about: from agency founders to in-house leaders, independents, and everyone in between. If you'd like to nominate someone (or yourself), send us a note at [email protected].

Janna Pea started her career on Capitol Hill. She moved through labor union communications — press secretary work, campaign communications for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, director of communications at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, before landing at Sunshine Sachs, then rising to Executive Vice President at BerlinRosen, where she led the agency's culture, social impact, and racial justice practice areas. She was known there for one thing above everything else: calm navigation of crisis situations.

That reputation makes sense when you understand how she thinks about the work. Janna doesn't describe what she does as PR. She describes it as culture and narrative change, and the distinction matters. The goal, as she has framed it, is not to fight for a seat at the table of representation but to build new rooms entirely. New venues. New movements. Spaces where diverse changemakers can transform the dominant narratives rather than simply insert themselves into them.

That philosophy became the foundation of Pea Nation, the boutique communications firm she launched, which earned a spot on The PR Net 100 in its first year. The agency's early work was a signal of exactly what Janna intended to build. A project supporting Melinda French Gates' team translated complex global economic arguments about women and power into the stories of five real women. Work with the Ford Foundation's Creativity and Free Expression team elevated cultural leaders into broader public view. A partnership with Open to All navigated sensitive DEI branding challenges in an environment that was becoming openly hostile to that work. Each project sits at the same intersection: culture and social impact, where the communications strategy and the cause are the same thing.

Janna has helped shape some of the most significant public moments of the past decade, from the Women's March to the #MeToo movement to the racial reckoning of summer 2020. She is a PRWeek Pride in PR honoree and a PRNEWS Top Women in PR honoree.

She is also exactly the kind of practitioner this community exists to celebrate: someone who has built a career on the conviction that communications is not a service function but a force for change, and who has the track record to prove it.

Want to be featured in Community Corner? Nominate yourself or someone you know at [email protected].

Everything above is free. Every week.

But if you want to go deeper, the case studies, strategic breakdowns, and more intel you can actually use at work, that's what the Inner Circle is for.

Inside this week's edition: the full Lush case study on activism as brand architecture, the Target and Costco story by the numbers, and a framework for counseling clients on when to speak and when not to.

All of it, every Sunday, for $8 a month. Less than your last coffee order.

Pitch Us: We are always looking for stories, campaigns, and perspectives worth covering. If you are working on something you think belongs in The PRGM Post, a campaign that got it right, an industry shift worth naming, a conversation the community should be having, we want to hear about it.

Pitch us at [email protected].