Part 1: Can Wokeness Be Branded?

Coming off the heels of Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month, here is a truthbomb for you: Martin Luther King, Jr. has been rebranded and in the worst way. I did not create this image (above) so if it offends you, talk to the people who wrote this article. It speaks to my anger with MLK’s modern rebranded image. Someone has a vested interest in keeping him safe and sanitary and I know I am not the only one angry about it.

PRIMAL ANGER

We are living in interesting times where public anger is regularly on full display. Marketers are even attempting to harness this discontent by redirecting us to companies that are sympathetic to our concerns. I eat at Chick-Fila because I like being served with a smile and being asked if I want more lemonade. I have grown tired of the poor customer service at other places. Plenty of companies have lost profit and market share because of angering their customers.

In today’s Wild Wild West of social media, perceptions are almost wholly owned by the consumers.  But in spite of this, people are still angry about…well…everything and companies are running scared. How do you sell products to consumers who can turn into the Incredible Hulk at any time?

Charles Duhigg wrote an article on Atlantic.com titled The Real Roots of American Rage detailing this phenomenon. Here is a quote from his article:

“Anger is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion.”

Is anger causing Facebook to lose users in response to their privacy data issues? A report predicts that Wells Fargo will lose thousands of banking customers in 2019 because of their shady practices. Everybody I know is angry at McDonalds. Once you add in the Womens March and college protests, one gets the impression that we just woke up from a deep slumber to the chaos of the zombie apocalypse and no one warned us.

CORPORATE BRANDED ACTIVISM AKA WOKENESS 2.0

Branding is about managing perceptions. For brands, that also includes managing public anger directed at them, their industry and/or specific issues. The first thing one hears in media crisis management is get out ‘in front of the story.’ Since this is becoming harder to do because of social media, embracing wokeness can be a a way to assuage the public angst of a coveted audience. This is what I call corporate branded activism which is a company’s fancy way of staying ‘I am woke, ya heard!’

This is the more popular woke definition: A reference to how people should be aware in current affairs.  

The term entered mainstream language 4-5 years ago through the Black Lives Matter movement. But before that, African Americans have used some version of it intermittently over the last 100 years. It was prominently used between 1987-1993 during the conservative Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years when crime in big cities was high and the federal government was cutting urban programs.

Hip Hop music went through a conscious black nationalist phase with rap artists such as Public Enemy, X-Clan, The Poor Righteous Teachers, Brand Nubian, Paris and The Coup espousing Black empowerment and collective action. Filmmaker Spike Lee contributed with several culturally relevant movies that placed Black culture, relationships and issues at the center. John Singleton and other Black filmmakers chased him highlighting other stories about urban Black life. Black fashion companies emerged like Karl Kani, FUBU, Cross Colors and PNB Nation along with Malcolm X shirts and caps.

As marketers saw suburban White teens embracing cultural expressions of urban African American culture during this time, they developed marketing strategies to sell brands to them such as Sprite (Obey your Thirst), Adidas (Run DMC), Nike (Air Jordans), AND 1 (Mixtape Tours), Rawkus Records (Hip Hop music), etc. But the wokeness of these companies centered primarily around profit and highlighting the cultural expressions…but not much on social awareness. If one goes even further back, the term wokeness can be found in the Black Power Movement, The Civil Rights Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. 

Because the term is all over social media, the definition continues to splinter and applied to other causes, organizations and companies such as Dove (Campaign for Real Beauty), Secret Deodorant (I’d Rather Get Paid Campaign), Patagonia (suing Trump for annulling public lands), Burger King (net neutrality), Delta Airlines (gun control), Heineken (Worlds Apart Ad), etc. I am not making a case for any of these companies as being woke. But this list should reminds us that it has become a public domain term and is being applied everywhere.

Giant razor-maker Gillette has waded into the wokeness 2.0 space with a 2-minute ‘The Best A Man Can Get’ ad promoting the ideals of the #MeToo movement to men. In the ad, they confess to promoting toxic masculinity through their past branding efforts. The first half of the ad portrays males sexually harassing women and bullying each other. Then, the narrator says something has changed and there will be no going back. The old line ‘boys will be boys’ is used to highlight men’s complicity with the issue. Then there is a call to action: men should intervene to stop other males from this destructive behavior. The ad concludes with “It’s only by challenging ourselves to do more, that we can get closer to our best.”

Gillette’s activism can be seen in another woke definition: You get a sudden understanding of what’s really going on and find out you were wrong about much of what you understood to be true. But do companies exist to promote populist causes? According to a Harvard Business Review article, companies exist to exploit the benefits of being big. They exist, in other words, to maximize efficiency at scale. The bigger a company gets, the more experience it accumulates, and the more its performance–particularly cost performance–improves.

In layperson’s language, large companies are able to make certain demands in the market and on society at a certain size. Gillette and many others fall into this category. Millennials and the younger generation are particularly open to businesses who make moral claims about their existence and actions. They intuitively understand branding because they grew up seeing everything commodified from cereal to causes and they have mastered information and communications technologies (ICTs). This has indirectly led to a marriage between today’s activism (online and offline) and branding. Millennials expect to see corporate branding strategies around issues important to them.

Click here to read Part 2.