Woke washing: what happens when marketing communications don’t match corporate practice
While consumers expect big brands to take a stand, they may not believe them when they do, write a team of marketing lecturers in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Brand activism has become the new marketing tactic of choice, and a brand’s stance on societal and political issues can offer a differentiating factor in a fast-paced corporate marketplace.
Historically brands have not engaged in social and political conversations for fear of potentially alienating customers, but our current research shows savvy brands are recognising that marketing budget spent on good causes can have the greatest reach and impact.
However, while consumers expect big brands to take a stand, they may not believe them when they do.
I have to say that this attitude of marketing and communications having to be neutral has come to an end.
Social media marketing directly leads to exacerbation of neuropsychiatric conditions, all over the world. Westpac Banking Corporation has ceased social media marketing.
We will soon too. But we have to get the message out first.
We are. Are you?
This whole article flows VERY similar to the BEME News video what was posted on YouTube yesterday…even to the examples used…c’mon mumbrella you’re better than just copying content
Hi George,
This piece is a crossposting from The Conversation, so it is quite literally copied content. Content we hope our readers will enjoy nonetheless.
Thanks,
Josie
Yeah, Nike is so woke they are still using slave labour to make their shoes.
Seriously, the Nike case can’t be looked at in isolation.
They have built the Nike brand off the back of people who change culture.
People who push us forward and not just in the sporting world. In America, that ain’t middle class white people who are burning their shoes right now. Those kinds of people sit back and suck up the culture – they don’t generally make it. (Obviously there are exceptions as this a massive generalisation)
It’s people on the edge and being on the edge, pushing us forward which means you have to back them to cross the line.
The other point to make is, when asking people ‘is this an appropriate topic for Nike to engage with’ that completely misses the point. It doesn’t actually matter what people think. It matters what they are going to think in five years time.
When you are dealing with people who are literally changing the world – what people think right now is almost always irrelevant.
As an industry we really need to stop looking at what we have in our hands but lift our eyes to the horizon.
It’s the ultimate in moral cowardice. None of the executives who pronounce a brand’s “position” on any issue has done it in their own right previously. They cower behind their brand, using it to virtue-signal in the hope that establishment elites will reward them with business or a directorship. They are as exploitative of the targets of their “benificence” as those they condemn. The poor, the black, the gay, the whatever are just chess pieces for their ambition. And worse, they impose their trashy, faddish ideologies upon their staff, in the most Stalin-eqsue ways, when those staff may rightly hold different opinions.
Your use of the term ‘virtue-signal’ gives away too much. The rest of your post is, at best, laughable.
Whether individuals have acted on these issues is entirely irrelevant, their job is to look at what the company stands for, and how their company acts to meet the requirements of stakeholders and customers.
If a company earns $6bn by speaking out, or supporting an athlete who speaks out, then by all shareholder metrics, they are doing their job.