Nobody likes to admit we need marketing, but the discipline has always been necessary to match people with the products and services that fulfil their needs and desires.
It started simply enough, with us focusing primarily on brands’ features and tangible benefits. But as consumer society evolved, we moved on to symbolic benefits: identities, lifestyles. Finally, we began selling values: an ideology that hit its zenith between 2015 and 2022 in the era of “brand purpose”.
It’s here we started to lose the plot. Brands no longer sought to be loved – they demanded to be supported, treated as movements rather than commercial entities. Do you stand with Nike against racial injustice? Do you support Hellmann’s in the fight against food waste?
By making purchasing decisions moral declarations, we sold the idea that we could self-correct through consumption. And brands were our champions at the centre of it all: our profitable agents of social reform.
And yet a decade on from the start of this period, in every conceivable domain, from the environment, to LGBTQ+ protections, to women’s bodily autonomy, to immigration and multiculturalism, it seems we’re skirting closer and closer to the fascist ideology we claimed to have defeated in 1945.
Every week, we’re met with news of brands adjusting to that new order, either scaling back their DEI or environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments or abandoning them all together.
How did it come to this?
It’s easy to blame the Trumps, the Tates, the podcasters, the broligarchy. Less easy is to examine the conditions that created them – and our own complicity within the professional class.
The contradictions of the brand purpose era are most apparent when looked at from the view of the average person. Social progress once came hand-in-hand with economic progress. Now, instead, social progress has been offered as a substitute for economic progress.
For the better part of the last decade, both consumers and employees have observed a marked contrast between multinational brands promoting wholesale social transformation, with bold proclamations for equity and justice for marginalised communities, while simultaneously being some of the single greatest contributors to the decline in living standards across the vast majority of the western world.
They’ve seen messaging grow increasingly heavy-handed, couched in shame, or used as a tactic for plain obfuscation. And they’ve asked the consumer to bear the cost of transition, often charging more for objectively worse products (hello, paper shopping bags).
It’s this contradiction that’s been so effectively exploited by the far right.
The appropriation and weaponisation of “woke” was supercharged by the narrative that leftist thinking had infiltrated the highest echelon of corporations. Painting the two as bedfellows has allowed a new breed of conservatives to occupy the position of “counter-cultural” – the net effect being large swathes of young people supporting authoritarian or ethno-nationalist political movements. In a bizarre inversion of reality, it’s somehow become punk to champion the same power structures that have dominated society for centuries.
What is saddest about this turn of events is that it was entered with good intentions. The brand purpose era was, in many ways, marketers trying to reconcile their roles such that they could feel they were effecting positive change even while playing the corporate game. Instead, it became yet another cautionary tale in capitalism’s ability to absorb its critiques and repackage them as aesthetics to be sold on a supermarket shelf.
Through the rear window it’s easy to see that the backlash was inevitable: if progressive values could so easily be commodified as a tool for selling mayonnaise, why shouldn’t those values be treated with the same fickleness as condiment preferences?
This piece isn’t intended as a call out to any individual. We all live under this system. To make a living means we are all in some way complicit. But as marketers, we must reckon with how we’ve trivialised activism by turning it into comms strategy, how we’ve co-opted movements only to abandon them when the winds changed.
The responsibility we bear now is undoing the lesson we inadvertently taught consumers over this era. Structural reform can’t be achieved through consumption choices – unfortunately, we’re all going to have to get dirt under our fingernails.
If this all sounds a bit doom and gloom, let me provide a reason to be optimistic. After two decades of misplaced optimism, we have entered a period the writer and “luxury memeologist” Edmond Lau has termed “the dark mode shift”. In this “mask-off” era, everyone’s true intentions have come to light. Your boss is back to looking like your boss, not Adam Sandler on a coffee run; your office is back to looking like an office, not a college common room.
And brands are back to their true role: creating fiction and spectacle to grease the wheels of consumption. Done right, I believe that fiction can still produce moments of extraordinary clarity and beauty.
But there’s a line to be drawn between what we do and where meaningful progress really comes from: grassroots movements, political organising, policy reform. Brands’ swift exit grants oxygen for more authentic acts of resistance to return to centre stage.
And if we’re not prepared to sacrifice profit in support of those causes, then perhaps our most radical act is one of humility – wielding our influence with greater care and consciousness than before.
Here’s to proclaiming: the revolution will not go better with Pepsi.
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