The Revolution Will Not Be Branded
An image showing Pride-themed branded content, produced for the Museum of Brands’ exhibition When Brands Take a Stand (image: Museum of Brands).
Although the term “woke” was popularised during the late 2010s, the expression and its political meaning emerged long before then. The notion of striving to “stay woke” – aware of and committed to addressing racial and social injustice – stems directly from African-American history, creativity, and activism, appearing in a 1962 glossary accompanying William Melvin Kelley’s New York Times article, ‘If You’re Woke You Dig It’.
Despite this, contemporary consumer culture frequently employs the term “woke” in ways that whitewash its genesis, confusing capitalist endeavours and corporate spin with collective racial justice action and sustained organising. The fact that the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) recently published an online article about brands “going woke” highlights how the word has entered the lexicon of the corporate world. “2019 supercharged brand involvement in issues of social responsibility,” wrote the CIM. “But as more of these stories come to light, the more polarising these issues can become. Do businesses, of all sizes, risk losing mass reach if they continue to pursue a ‘woke’ strategy?”
In May 2020, the fatal police brutality and anti-Black violence inflicted upon George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery (among other Black people in the US), galvanised Black grassroots organising and the Movement for Black Lives. In response to this, many brands rushed to issue public statements about racism and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. “WE STAND WITH THE BLACK COMMUNITY AGAINST RACISM AND INEQUALITY,” tweeted the toy company Lego, for instance, promising to donate $4m to charities supporting Black children and promoting education about racial equality: “THERE IS MUCH TO DO.” Meanwhile, UK advertising trade bodies and leaders from ad agencies pledged their “solidarity with the Black community” by signing an open letter which stated their alleged intention to “maintain inclusive cultures that are sensitive to the enduring injustice and pain of racism”. During this same time, fashion brands such as Versace have peppered their social media content with phrases like “say no to racism”, while fellow luxury brand Prada distanced itself from prior criticism of “blackface” merchandise it had produced in 2018 by referring to “the injustices facing the Black community”. Across various sectors, brands pledged to “hire more Black people” and claimed they would “amplify Black voices”, and “diversify” their industries. Many commercial organisations’ carefully crafted PR statements still circulate, perhaps signalling the ongoing attempt to frame brands and the ad industry as woke.
For more than five years, as part of my research into the media experiences of Black women in Britain, I have been exploring how brands attempt to portray themselves as supporters of Black and social justice activism. The assumed woke attributes of brands have been praised by some media, but this form of strategic marketing can symbolically, and sometimes ambiguously, merely gesture towards activism. A case in point is when brands are celebrated for featuring images of activists in their campaigns, regardless of the reality that many companies’ dubious employment conditions are at odds with the principles of racial justice upheld by the activists that they aspire to be associated with.
In 2019, for instance, Nike’s Dream Crazy won the award for outstanding commercial at the Creative Arts Emmys. Narrated by quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and published alongside the slogan “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything”, the commercial is built around Kaepernick’s ostracisation from the NFL after he took the knee during the American national anthem in 2016. “We believe Colin is one of the most inspirational athletes of this generation, who has leveraged the power of sport to help move the world forward,” Nike executive Gino Fisanotti said of the advert. However, since the release of Behind the Swoosh in 2011, a documentary that addressed the company’s connections to sweatshop labour, Nike has faced repeated criticism concerning reports of child labour and unethical treatment of people working in its factories around the world. To what extent are Nike’s recent campaigns around Black Lives Matter and matters of racial justice and equality part of ongoing rehabilitative efforts to shed its association with the exploitation of those working in sweatshops?
Another example of the disconnect between the social justice principles that brands espouse and their history of unethical labour practices is found in a 2020 Retail Gazette article that lists “the retailers going beyond solidarity for Black Lives Matter”. Published on 12 June, the article exemplifies how brands are commended for their supposedly “tangible action” in response to social justice issues, even if those same brands have been extensively critiqued for their unethical labour practices. Included on Retail Gazette’s list are the fashion brand PrettyLittleThing, whose parent company Boohoo has faced accusations that workers in its UK supply chain are paid below minimum wage, and Amazon, whose abuses have been well documented. The commodification of “woke” is also evident when reflecting on how certain celebrities, such as the Asian-American actor and comedian Awkwafina, have been hailed as woke, even as they have been critiqued for appropriating Black culture. As such, over the last half decade, conversations concerning woke- washing have garnered momentum, with Pepsi’s 2017 Live for Now commercial, featuring American model and TV personality Kendall Jenner, representing something of a pinnacle of the phenomenon.
Released on 5 April, Live for Now was a film commercial that tactlessly invoked images and ideas associated with Black social justice movements to sell a soft drink. Such was the backlash, that Pepsi pulled it a day after launch, stating: “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark and we apologize.” The ad depicts a stand-off between protestors and police, which is immediately defused by Jenner offering a police officer a can of Pepsi. It was a crass deployment of the white saviour archetype, as embodied by Jenner, but the commercial may also be interpreted as promoting an essentially consumerist notion of activism – one that emphasises the imagined potential of personal purchasing choices to prop up structural change and resistance movements, but which ultimately contradicts what activism actually entails. Such a focus on individual consumption in the context of protest imagery – choosing a can of Pepsi over another kind of soft drink – is symptomatic of how some brands push their products on the pretence that they care about social movements, as well as implying that personal consumer habits are a meaningful mode of supporting such movements. Just as there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so too is there no activism that is branded.
Live for Now is one of many examples of woke-washing, an expression encompassing superficial advertising that frames individuals or institutions as being invested in tackling social injustices. Two years after this commercial and the word “woke” entering the Oxford English Dictionary, the digital marketing news outlet Marketing Dive referred to 2019 as “the year of ‘woke-washing’”. Marketing Dive reported industry experts warning that “an uptick in socially and politically aware advertising can read more as chasing headlines than meeting real consumer demands,” and that it could “degrade trust in the industry.” Despite such warnings, woke-washing seems to be thriving in 2020. Discussions and debates around the term have surged in recent years, moving from niche corners of the internet to the centre of much marketing industry and academic discourse that wrestles with the corporatisation of activism, such as the evolution of commercial LGBTQIA+ Pride events.
In September 2020, London’s Museum of Brands opened When Brands Take a Stand, an exhibition which was meant to open in March but had been delayed by Covid-19. The exhibition presents “TV commercials, posters and packaging” that explore how brands have engaged with social and political issues such as “fights for equal rights”. In the months since the original opening date, there has been a sharp increase in the number of brands commenting on matters regarding racism and Black lives, prompting conversations about the hypocrisy of corporations that claim to be both “anti-racist” and advocates of Black activism, but whose track records tell a different story. Sephora, for instance, is a French multinational chain of personal care and beauty stores which was the first company to sign a “15 per cent pledge” to sell more Black-owned brands. It is also known for its racial profiling of Black customers, as reported by the musician SZA in 2019. In response to the reckoning surrounding racial consciousness that has occurred within retail in 2020, Sephora is now taking more substantial steps, including commissioning a landmark study on racial bias in retail, led by Cassi Pittman Claytor and David Crockett, experts on race and discrimination within marketplace contexts. If such a study results in long-term action on the part of brands, it could be a positive move towards more meaningful industry efforts than performative social media statements.
Ad Age magazine publishes a “regularly updated blog tracking brands’ responses to racial injustice”, listing examples such as Facebook’s 2020 launch of “Black Business August” in support of National Black Business Month. The launch of a pro-business month that focuses on commercial activity, as opposed to a long-term strategy to address structural anti-Blackness, does little to distract from the fact that, in 2020, Facebook was hit by its largest ever advertiser boycott over its ineffective efforts to tackle racism on its platform. Brands continue to vie for a reputation comparable to Ben & Jerry’s, the US ice cream manufacturer which has issued statements condemning white supremacy and voiced support of BLM for years. Ben & Jerry’s has previously published articles about systemic racism, slavery, and mass incarceration, as well as donating millions of dollars to social causes every year. Nevertheless, brands are not activists. To suggest otherwise is to diminish the efforts of activists who, unlike brands, are not profit-oriented and typically work without institutional support or the types of funds and resources that are readily available to commercial organisations.
Sadly, brands show little sign of ceasing to (mis)use notions of social justice activism as part of their marketing. What we are currently witnessing is far from a new wave of branding, however. In 2012, NYU Press published Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, a book highlighting how marketplace activity has been simultaneously entangled and at odds with activism for a long time. “Within contemporary culture it is utterly unsurprising to participate in social activism by buying something,” write Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser. Since the Black is Beautiful movement became established in the US in the 1960s, brands have attempted to tap into discourse surrounding it, as evidenced by Proctor & Gamble’s 2007 My Black is Beautiful campaign. “This is a movement,” said Maureen Lippe, president of the agency running the campaign for Proctor & Gamble, as reported in PR Week. “And our biggest challenge is to keep this movement going and coming up with initiatives that will resonate within this community.” What makes the woke-washing of the 2010s unique, however, is the rise of social media and its role in both activism and corporate marketing. The one-to-many communication flows used by brands before the ascent of the internet have been usurped by more dialogic and democratised media production processes afforded by new media technologies. A relatively broad demographic of people (reductively categorised by brands as “consumers” and “target markets”) can now publicly talk back at brands and call out cynical advertising. For every brand that reduces liberationist work to shallow and self-serving representational gestures, there is at least one person, if not many more, who may use digital tools to combat such marketing narratives. That Pepsi took down its Live for Now campaign is a prime example of this.
The continued existence of woke-washing, however, despite the backlash it has generated, is perhaps evidence that some brands believe there is no such thing as bad press. Alternatively, its persistence may indicate that brands are attuned to the reality that many people expect companies to take a clear stand on socio-political issues. ‘The Dying Days of Spin’, a 2018 FleishmanHillard Fishburn report, took a case study of 1,000 UK consumers and found that up to 80 per cent stopped using a product or service provided by a company if they disagreed with its response to a specific issue. “The issues that society is choosing to confront and correct are growing in number, perceived importance and anticipated rate of change,” wrote Stephanie Bailey in the report’s introduction. “This is both a fact to be celebrated as well as one to be cognisant of as a business.” Such research may be interpreted by some brands as a call to express their opinions on social issues, but may also result in activity that is more symptomatic of woke-washing than a sincere commitment to social change.
Some industry conversations about anti-Blackness and racism have already dwindled since they surfaced in spring 2020, but many brands are still shoehorning in language and visual representations associated with Black lives without doing anything substantial to address how they are complicit in the maintenance of structural oppression. Fast-fashion company Missguided, for example, still has a statement on its website encouraging people to donate to various charities associated with Black Lives Matter (“We stand – and will always stand – for diversity and equality. Where we can, we’ll use the privilege of our platform, to empower and promote inclusivity”) as well as suggesting related shows to watch, podcasts to listen to, and books to read. Nonetheless, the brand has only this year agreed to publish details of its suppliers, after having been accused of airbrushing its potential involvement in unethical working conditions by organisations such as the Labour Behind the Label campaign.
As the sociologist Ruha Benjamin poignantly puts it in her vital book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), “economic recognition is a ready but inadequate proxy for political representation and social power”. Brands that claim to aid Black activism by adopting a superficial approach of incorporating more images of Black people in their campaigns, or which solely signal their interest in the purchasing power of Black people, mistakenly equate economic recognition with the dismantling of white supremacy. Marketing industry discourse includes claims that marketing practitioners are seriously reckoning with racism in their industry, including Vogue Business reporting in June 2020 that “Influencer marketing, long lacking diversity, faces a reckoning”. Still, what tends to be missing from some of this discussion is a recognition of the limited nature of the type of structural change that marketers and brands claim to contribute to.
A redistribution of resources is a necessary component of addressing structural inequalities and, arguably, this requires the abolition of free- market capitalism. But saying that marketers, advertisers, and public relations practitioners are not at the helm of radical work in this field is not the same as suggesting the complete redundancy of such efforts. I recognise attempts to address racial injustices within these sectors, including discriminatory hiring practices, while still acknowledging that such efforts are not the same as radical work towards dismantling the capitalist, colonialist, and anti-Black structures that have led to the existence of marketing and branding as we know them today.
Some woke-washing may resonate with pockets of centrist and liberal demographics who seek to self-soothe through shopping, and whose critique of capitalism stops short of robustly questioning the motivations of brands that frame themselves as woke. Some may see woke-washing as a sign that the struggles represented in marketing, albeit shallowly, have become more societally acknowledged. Yet representation by and within commercial contexts is a far cry from liberation. Just because certain social issues are alluded to in advertising does not mean that they are being effectively tackled by the majority in society.
To insinuate that people or institutions can market, advertise, brand, and buy themselves and society out of the grips of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is, at best, misguided. At worst, it is just another political and public relations tactic that reflects profitable industry trends, rather than a genuine commitment to abolishing oppressive structures. Contrary to what brands may imply, systemic oppression will not be ended through people’s purchasing of products or celebration of their spending power. The commodification of activism and social causes is part of, and a symptom of, the structural problems that must be tackled. It is not the solution to tackling them that some brands present it as being; despite their dogged determination, the revolution will not be branded.
Words Francesca Sobande
This article was originally published in Disegno #27. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
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