No‑bag effect in cultural institutions

When legacy cultural brands adopt editorial priorities that conflict with core customer expectations (e.g., substituting product/beauty content for political critique), paying customers feel betrayed and can abandon the brand. This feedback loop accelerates decline: moral signaling intended to court new constituencies instead pushes away the existing revenue base and undermines institutional resilience. — Identifying this dynamic helps predict which cultural institutions are most vulnerable to rapid audience loss when they prioritize ideological signaling over the services that sustain them.