Last week, Prada announced Palestinian singer Saint Levant, born Marwan Abdelhamid in Jerusalem and raised partly in Gaza, as a global brand ambassador. Within days, the Italian luxury house was at the center of a firestorm. The trigger was not the appointment itself, but a detail: in the campaign video posted to Prada's 33 million Instagram followers, the artist wore a silver pendant shaped like the map of historic, pre-1948 Palestine.

To millions of his fans, the necklace was an expression of heritage and identity, the post drew roughly 118,000 likes, many accompanied by messages of support. To pro-Israel critics, that same outline, which contains no Israel, read as the erasure of a nation, and calls for a full boycott of Prada followed swiftly. Prada, at the time of writing, has said nothing.

 I am not here to adjudicate the Middle East. Reasonable, and unreasonable people hold deeply felt, opposing views on that pendant, and both sides in this controversy believe what they believe. What interests me, and what should interest every food and restaurant executive reading this, is the mechanics of what just happened, why a sophisticated company chose to do it, and whether there was a smarter play available. Because the food industry has run this experiment several times in recent years, and the results are measurable, expensive, and instructive.

 First, the honest question: why did Prada do it?

It is tempting to call this a blunder. The data suggests it was a calculation. Consider what Prada is buying:

The customer of 2030. Bain & Company's luxury research has shown that Gen Z and millennial consumers have driven essentially all of the luxury market's recent growth, with Gen Z projected to represent roughly a third of luxury purchases by 2030. This is a generation that consistently tells researchers it buys on identity and values, and one that, across most global surveys, skews heavily sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Saint Levant, a 25-year-old trilingual artist with a devoted global fanbase, is a direct pipeline to that cohort.

The Gulf wallet. The Middle East is one of luxury's fastest-growing regions, and cultural fluency there is now a commercial requirement, not a gesture.

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A pattern, not a one-off. Prada named Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid its first global beauty ambassador earlier this year, and beauty giant Huda Beauty had already run a Saint Levant collaboration framed as a tribute to Palestinian culture. Prada is not stumbling; it is positioning.

The engagement economy. Attention is the scarcest commodity and today’s currency of persuasion in marketing, and this campaign became one of the most discussed moments of Milan Fashion Week. In luxury, a category protected by scarcity, status, and desire, controversy can function as amplification.

Here is the uncomfortable strategic truth: Prada may have concluded that the customers it gains are worth more than the customers it loses. Luxury can sometimes make that math work. But notice what the strategy is: it is a side-taking strategy. Prada chose a constituency. That raises the more innovative question nobody in the boardroom seems to have asked.

The road not taken: what would a conciliatory partnership have looked like?

 Imagine the alternative campaign. Not a retreat into blandness, blandness is death in the relevance economy, but a partnership built on bridging rather than representing one side. The remarkable thing is that the raw material exists, and much of it comes from food and culture:

Ottolenghi and Tamimi. Yotam Ottolenghi, an Israeli from West Jerusalem, and Sami Tamimi, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, met in London and co-authored Jerusalem, one of the best-selling cookbooks of the century, a love letter to a shared cuisine claimed by both peoples. Their partnership did more for mutual recognition at dinner tables worldwide than most diplomatic communiqués. A luxury or food brand pairing voices like these makes a statement and builds a bridge.

 The KIND precedent. Before Daniel Lubetzky built KIND into a snack empire, he founded PeaceWorks, a "not-only-for-profit" venture selling food products made through cooperation between Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian and Turkish suppliers. The business thesis was explicit: shared commercial interest creates relationships that survive political storms. Lubetzky proved a food company could be structurally pro-peace, not rhetorically pro-one-side.

 The Divan model. Conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian scholar Edward Said founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, seating young Israeli and Arab musicians side by side. Groups like Jerusalem's Chefs for Peace have done the same with kitchens.

Any of these models, the duo, the supply chain, the shared table, was available to Prada. An ambassador pairing rather than an ambassador; a campaign about a shared future rather than a contested map. Would it have generated 118,000 likes? Perhaps fewer. Would it have generated boycott calls? Almost certainly fewer. Indeed, it would have positioned the brand somewhere genuinely scarce: not on the safe sidelines, and not in one trench, but on the bridge. In a marketplace where every brand is being pressured to pick a side, the bridge is the least crowded, and therefore most differentiated, position in marketing.

 The bigger question: what is corporate responsibility actually for?

This is where I want to push the industry's thinking, because the Prada episode exposes a strange gap in how we define corporate responsibility.

Every serious company on earth invests in conflict resolution, internally. In hospitality’s ultra-high stress environment, we train managers in mediation. We hire HR specialists to de-escalate disputes. We teach negotiation, active listening, and interest-based problem solving. We know, from decades of organizational practice, how to motivate two parties, who genuinely dislike each other, to function together, because the alternative costs money. Conflict resolution is arguably one of the most developed competencies in modern business.

Yet the moment conflict appears outside the office walls, business retreats to one of two postures: silence, or side-taking. We deploy none of the skill we use every day internally. Why?

The public, interestingly, has already noticed the gap. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, surveying nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries, found that business is now the most trusted institution in the world at 64%, rated more competent and more ethical than government, media, or NGOs. "My employer" scores 78%, higher still. Here is the finding that should stop every CEO cold: roughly three-quarters of respondents, including majorities of both open-minded and insular respondents, say they expect employers to actively broker trust between groups that distrust each other, and 73% expect the CEO to lead that process. Meanwhile, seven in ten people now report being unwilling or hesitant to trust anyone with different values or backgrounds, and three in four say they will boycott brands over the countries they come from.

Read those numbers together and a picture emerges: society is fragmenting into hostile camps, the traditional referees, government and media, have lost the room, and the public has quietly handed the whistle to business. Not because companies are saints, but because they are the last institutions where people with opposing politics still show up every day, work toward shared goals, and eat lunch at the same table.

There is precedent for business accepting this role. In Northern Ireland, the business community, through the Confederation of British Industry's famous 1994 "peace dividend" argument, played a documented part in building public appetite for the peace process, making the economic case for ending the Troubles when politicians could not. Commerce was the neutral language both communities spoke.

So here is the redefinition I'd propose. Corporate responsibility 1.0 was philanthropy: write the check. Version 2.0 was ESG: clean up your own footprint. Version 3.0, the one this moment demands, is convening: using business's unique trust position, and its genuine internal expertise in resolving conflict, to host the dialogue that governments and platforms have failed to sustain. Not picking winners, instead building tables.

What the numbers say happens when you pick a trench instead

 For food and beverage brands, the cost of the side-taking alternative is now well documented:

Bud Light (2023) one sponsored post with influencer Dylan Mulvaney cut sales roughly 28% in three months per Harvard Business Review's analysis; market share fell from about 12% to under 9%; S&P Global tracked a $15.7 billion drop in AB InBev's market value; purchase incidence was still down 32% in Q4, months later. The brand lost its two-decade U.S. crown to Modelo.

Starbucks (2023–24) without ever taking a position, the company became a boycott target from both directions after its union's "Solidarity with Palestine" post and the trademark lawsuit that followed. Same-store sales fell 4% in a quarter analysts expected to grow 1%; its Middle East franchisee Alshaya cut roughly 2,000 jobs.

 McDonald's (2023–24) after its independent Israeli franchisee donated meals to soldiers, boycotts across the Middle East and Muslim-majority markets contributed to the company's first global sales decline since 2020, and it ultimately bought back all 225 Israeli restaurants. A region worth ~2% of global sales inflicted global reputational damage.

KFC Malaysia (2024) operator QSR Brands temporarily closed 108 of roughly 600 outlets amid Gaza-linked boycotts.

Pepsi (2017) the Kendall Jenner protest ad, an attempt to borrow the imagery of social conflict without doing the work of engaging with it, was pulled within about 24 hours.

Researchers studying Bud Light identified why food and beverage brands are uniquely exposed: our products are highly substitutable, consumed visibly, and owned psychologically by our customers. Nobody needs your latte. Luxury has moats; a QSR feels a controversy at the register by Friday. Whatever latitude Prada has, hospitality has less, which makes the bridge strategy not just nobler for food brands, but commercially safer.

The balanced takeaway

There is a genuine, honorable case for what Prada did: representation matters, Saint Levant's supporters see a global house finally acknowledging Palestinian identity, and audiences increasingly reward brands that reflect who they are. There is an equally sincere community that experienced the same campaign as a horrific and unnacceptable denial of their established and historic country's existence. Both reactions are real. That is exactly the problem with side-taking as a strategy: it guarantees that your marketing budget will manufacture pain for someone, and in the age of the instant boycott, pain converts to revenue loss with terrifying efficiency.

Relevance, the currency I've spent my career studying, requires brands to stand close to culture. However, standing close to culture does not have to mean enlisting in its wars. The most innovative move available to any brand right now, and especially to food brands whose whole product is the shared table, is the one almost nobody is making: partner with the bridge-builders, invest in the Ottolenghis and Tamimis and Lubetzkys of the world, and treat dialogue itself as the brand statement. Business already knows how to resolve conflict, we do it in every workplace, every week. The institutions that were supposed to do it in public have failed, and the public, per Edelman, is openly asking us to try.

The first major brand that answers that call won't just avoid a boycott. It will own the most valuable positioning of the decade: the company that brought people back to the same table.

Robert Ancill is a global restaurant and food industry consultant, CEO of The Next Idea Group, and the author of The Relevance Code.

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