🇺🇸 We're So Damn Good At This

Americans Are Probably the Best Marketers in the World — Plus, July is On a Hot Streak for S&P Returns

Author

Katie Perry
July 05, 2025

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The Big Story: Maybe Our Greatest Export Is a Narrative

Is anyone better at marketing than Americans? Seriously.

We branded a war for independence as a liberation. We turned expansionism into destiny. We sold the whole world on Jordans, McDonald’s, Michael Jackson, and “freedom.” Our national identity is so effective, so emotionally sticky, that even when it fractures, it still holds.

If you know me, you know I LOVE Ken Burns. His documentaries — in collaboration with longtime co-producer Lynn Novick — are slow, steady, painstakingly thorough, and layered. They’re about how history feels. The gentle zoom across a photograph. The quiet confidence of a voiceover that isn’t trying to go viral. Burns’ body of work constantly reminds us that America is a story. And that story has been heavily (and I’d say, expertly) curated, edited, and retold in every generation to serve the moment.

Storytelling is America’s greatest strength, but it’s also one of our biggest blind spots.

“The Civil War” on PBS made Ken Burns a household name.

Unlike many countries that evolved from centuries-old monarchies or geography-bound borders, America was created on a premise and a set of ideals made real only by belief. As political scientist Benedict Anderson wrote, nations are “imagined communities” held together by shared narratives, not just shared land.

As Ken Burns puts it in The Atlantic: In America, we’re constantly telling stories about who we think we are, and who we hope to become. His career is essentially a thesis on that idea. Whether it’s the Civil War, jazz, baseball, or Vietnam, Burns traces how stories create meaning, and how those meanings evolve (and repeat) over time.

Importantly, for Burns, “storytelling” isn’t always an innocent branding exercise. It’s also about power. Which stories are being told, and which aren’t, carry equal weight as he attempts to make sense of the past to better navigate the present.

Burns’ 18-hour-long series on the Vietnam War is centered around one idea: “There is no single truth in war.” The power of that sentence lies in how rarely it gets said. There are many truths, but perhaps even more half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies. All of these things exist together.

Now that the potato salad has been consumed, the Sam Adams summer ale imbibed, and the dull residual smoke of fireworks has passed, it feels like a good time to state the obvious. These days, articulating your relationship to this country can feel like a lose-lose situation.

Celebrate it too loudly, and you risk being seen as naive, or worse, bigoted — as someone who ignores history, glosses over injustice, or hasn’t been paying attention. Critique it too sharply, and you’re accused of being disloyal, ungrateful, or “un-American.” We’ve arrived at a point where any reaction to patriotism is immediately put on trial.

This isn’t just frustrating. It’s limiting. Because the truth is, most of us live somewhere in the gray: proud of what this country aspires to be, uncomfortable with what it has sometimes been, and not quite sure how to reconcile the two.

Political scientist Joseph Nye warned of this trap decades ago. In Soft Power, he described how America’s ability to project a compelling story to the world — a story of freedom, prosperity, moral clarity — could also blind us to harder truths at home. In other words, when a country becomes its own myth, it loses the ability to reflect.

Ronald Reagan’s farewell address conjured a sermon written in 1630. He references a nation that is “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace […] free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.” And if there must be walls, he continued, the walls should have doors “open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.“

The “city on the hill” is a nice, clean metaphor on its surface, but Reagan’s articulation of it is not. The America he paints — at least at the twilight of his tenure in public office — is messy, chaotic, and in flux.

Yet, our current discourse leaves little room for that degree of complexity. Because no matter what story we hold about America, we want it to be simple. It’s gotta fit in a cable news chyron. Or a 280-character tweet. Or a 30-second TikTok set to whatever Sabrina Carpenter song is trending at the moment.

“I swear they choose me; I’m not choosing them.”

So, we treat national pride like a zero-sum game: you’re either all in, or all out. But nuance is not betrayal. If there’s one thing history shows us, through wars, reckonings, movements, and reinventions, it’s that the American story has never been static. We revise. We adapt. We grow. And we, regrettably, revert.

I think a healthy first step as Americans is to be open to admitting what has been edited out. And that requires a degree of intellectual curiosity, that frankly, I’m not always sure we have in us. Telling the fuller story isn’t easy. It’s messy and it’s more work, but it’s the only way to arrive at anything close to the truth, which, yes, includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. Because we have been (and are) all three.

If you grew up loving the story of America, as I did, it’s disorienting to realize how much got left out of the frame. Page after page of lore about westward migration, and “Oh, by the way, there was also this heinous thing called the Trail of Tears.” A comprehensive look at the horrors of the post-war reconstruction era, only for that chapter to end nicely and neatly before pivoting to World War I. And for Millennials like me, coming of age after 9/11 and being sold on unending and confusing wars with the intellectual depth of a Toby Keith song.

In America, the myth always resonates, but the omissions echo, too. And I think that’s what causes that brief twinge of discomfort some of us may feel while waving a flag on July 4. It’s not so much shame as it is humility.

Expanding the story of America isn’t the same as rejecting it. Including more voices isn’t a rewrite of history; rather, it’s a more accurate record. In this country, contradiction is central to the plot. And yes, you can love a country and still hold it accountable. I think loving the country necessitates holding it accountable. Otherwise, at the end of the day, we’re just a bunch of enablers.

Are we the best? Or, are we the worst? Are we the “good guys?” Or, are we the villains? Are we the “shining city on the hill?” Or, are we the “shithole country?” Yes. To all of it.

This isn’t a story that nicely fits on an Under Armour T-shirt, and it’s not one you can easily reference while arguing with strangers on the Internet, but I think it’s an important one to discuss. It’s an impossibly complicated story to tell, but if anyone can tell it, it just might be us.

Now Here’s a Chart

Money month! The S&P 500 has closed in green every single July for the past 10 years.

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Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.