However, with inequities becoming even more of a pressing topic, and the expectation from brands to be active participants in society – activism to action, is there an inevitable movement that we will see? And hence, this post on brands through the prism of activism and morality, from the perspectives of a consumer and a brand marketer, and the safety of an armchair.

“We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.”

Clay Routledge

Communication: In the case of brands, one could argue that what good is morality without signalling? Who has the time to discover “goodness”? Once upon a time, in the days of one-way media, this was easy. But these days, any stance becomes automatically confrontational because… social media. But before we even get to the stance, consider plain communication.

I found the Bingo case hilarious because it was based on a perception that Ranveer’s character was making fun of Sushant! We have moved from people believing whatever they want to people insisting that brands also believe it! The Myntra logo change is another recent example. A more polarising one? Swiggy and the farmers protests tweet. It’s not just the communication. Zomato even had to explain why it was advertising on Republic TV. I did wonder how it was spotted though – if one hates the channel, would one be watching it?

Most consumer-facing brands would love to be part of popular culture. And maybe even shape it. Because that’s where money is made. Remember commissioned researches highlighting “trends” that favoured brands? But now, any contact with culture is a double edged sword. It also means that just signalling using communication is a recipe for disaster. This leads us to the business at large.

Business: Back in November, an India – Australia match was interrupted by a spectator holding up a placard with the SBI logo and “No $1 BN ADANI LOAN”. Thanks to social media, YONO (You Only Need One) to go viral! And SBI is not even famous for taking a stance.

But let’s step back. Tom Roach makes a compelling case for “Brand purpose. The biggest lie the ad industry ever told?“, and also draws some excellent distinctions on the three types of “purposeful brands” – Born Purposeful, Corporate Converts, and Pseudo-Purposeful.

But there are complexities. Take Ben & Jerry’s. Sugar aside, they are a B corp (“businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose”) – a poster child for purposeful brands, I’d say. But they are also part of Unilever, which on one hand has a policy to help staff facing abuse, but also have the controversial Dove, not to mention Axe, and Fair & Lovely! Similarly, while Bournvita wins brownies for exam ads, and Cadbury for hyper-personalisation, the parent company Mondelez continues to face several accusations of “fairwashing” and environmental damage.

Ikea, another favourite brand, has built some amazing experiences (in addition to iconic ads), but even as they promise to address sustainability, they face some pretty steep challenges. Nike is famous for inspiring ads, but I have written about its double standards earlier. And there is an excellent FT article on internal cultural issues.

Some cases are a bit more black & white. Big Tech is probably a good replacement for Big Tobacco. Not one in GAFA is without serious blemishes. Then there are edtech giants exploiting parents’ FOMO, and promising to help their kids crack the million $ salary code. Real money gaming does virtue signalling by showing ads that have folks using their gains for a good cause, never mind the addiction involved.

A small note on celebrity brands. It’s probably easier because on a relative scale, the public face is usually an individual. Though it is true that they get called out repeatedly for their errors. In 2020, Indian celebrities and #BlackLivesMatter turned out to be quite a #facepalm. When Virat Kohli, who famously declined a Pepsi endorsement and deservingly earned praise, promotes MPL, are we to believe he is oblivious of the harm caused? Meanwhile, call me cynical, but I thought Sonu Sood’s “investments” have given him handsome endorsement returns!

In summation, I think, most brands and businesses are somewhere on the spectrum. Between politics, racial injustice, gender discrimination, environmental concerns, religion, and so on, there are many eggshells, and I understand that the task is not easy. The only beef I have is with false intent signalling. Is that “fake it until you make it”? I don’t know. Capitalism is already trying to mould it with things like ESG funds, many of which have Big Tech stocks! The hope is that between B-corps and zebras (below), we will go from tokenism to “__washing” to actual change.

Consumer:

“We’re living in an era of ‘woke’ capitalism, right? I’m Nike, I pretend to care about black people. You pretend to hate capitalism and buy my trainers.”

“Industry” (BBC/HBO)

This pretension helps us retain our self image while consuming the things and experiences. There is narrative cohesion while avoiding uncomfortable truths. And sometimes, even some virtue signalling. This is not judgment by the way. We’re wired for short-term gratification, and our lifestyles ensure that choices are heavily influenced by convenience. I shop from Amazon while theoretically being against what it is doing to retail businesses and consumption in general.

In this context, I feel for Indian parents – between edtech companies telling them that coding should be part of pregnancy (well, almost there!) to Bournvita shaming them, it’s a tough choice! Products containing sugar doing virtue signalling is some irony, but I am not sure the Indian consumer is ready to recognise it yet.

I think there will be a few steps before we reach awareness and action at a consumer level. Sometime back, Dhathri Ayurveda was fined by the consumer disputes redressal commission for misleading ads. Significantly, so was the ad’s endorser. I am hoping to see influencers becoming accountable next. And then, maybe it will be easier for consumers to think about this. Though I do see an early majority of customers making these choices because now there are options.

I’d say that a lot of consumer activism and brands supporting activism in the last year have been a reaction to Covid. Not that the emotions didn’t exist, but tectonic changes in lifestyles “forced” us to take stock. ‘Woke from home”, as I said once. How much of this will continue in the years to come remains to be seen.

Marketer: My profession requires me to view ads through lenses different from a regular consumer. That’s probably why my angst tends to bubble up earlier too. And the dilemma ranges from simple daily operations to larger strategic decisions and even career progression. As a brand marketer, I use Facebook and Google extensively, conscious of the platforms’ malicious intent. Each time we brainstorm ideas/campaigns, we screen for whether it will offend anyone. Sometimes this comes at the cost of creativity. Because it needn’t even be offensive, it just needs to be perceived that way. Who cares about the intent? I have also realised this is a serious limitation on one’s choices of employment. But that’s a different story, of morality and self image. What it does make me realise is that when an individual finds it unclear, it is perhaps too much to expect an abstract like a “brand” to get it right! But then again,

‘All it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to say, “It’s a business.”

Alan Shore, Boston Legal

P.S. A wonderful story from a while back. On business and human dignity.

I followed it up with  Brand with a worldview, which had examples from the Super Bowl 2017 ads, many of which had an overt or covert political stance. My inference was that we are largely irrational creatures, and absolutely prone to confirmation biases. We’d love our brands to echo our world view… Smart money would be on brands that can use data to glean consumer sentiment beyond domain, and leverage that understanding when forming a world view.

This post takes the thought forward, and I have framed it quite simplistically with 3 aspects – customer, competition, and company. We also have a hot example to embellish the hypothesis – Nike! Tons have been written about its latest adventures, but let’s just overdo it anyway.

Customer: While I have some beef with this post which called the Nike ad “brand purpose at its worst”, it does ask some relevant questions. The most important one being “what does the customer want?” As per the post, he/she just wants better products, and there is very little demand for more philosophy, ideology, or opinions. I beg to differ, as I find it relevant in the customer’s decision making process. And my reason for that is this

When a consumer market is new, distribution wins. As consumer become educated, product wins. When products reach parity, brand wins.

— Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed (@jeremysliew) May 23, 2017

Even if I keep that aside for a second, there are three kinds of emotions customers would have in this context – love, hate, indifference. To use the Nike example, I am betting that the burning by the second will be compensated by the earning  from the first. Nike’s sales have already increased 61% and shares rebounded to a record high. (via) Makes sense because in my view, a brand that takes on a purpose is actually doing benefit laddering – the benefit here for the customer is the association with a brand that echoes their world view. It speaks to their self image and/or gives them social validation. So, “shut up and take my money!” The third set will judge by the product – Nike does a good job of it anyway. On the count that Nike is doing a disservice to the underprivileged by selling them sneakers via the con job fantasy that they should “sacrifice everything” . Well sorry, it’s a brand, and not some mafia that has put a gun to your head! People have a choice, and they should use it responsibly!

Competition: As the same post points out, every other brand is now marching on the path to purpose for the sake of brand differentiation. Nike had to level up. With this polarising move, I’d say that they just made their moat bigger. At the risk of digressing and anthropomorphism, Nike is getting better at what Taleb calls “skin in the game“, which is not just about the incentives, but the more essential aspect: filtering and the facilitation of evolution. The play books of brand and marketing are disappearing as fast as they are made, so one could argue that taking calculated risks is the only strategic option for brand evolution and long term growth.

Company: Rajesh Lalwani has done an excellent job of explaining why Nike needed to do it and were the perfect brand for it, by deconstructing the campaign in the context of the larger brand journey. I am merely adding to it. To do what Nike has done, I think a brand needs to have what I call the integrity of intent. I am not yet sure whether that is interchangeable with authenticity. I see two approaches to integrity of intent, based on what the optimisation is for. The first is an honest “skin in the game” approach to the brand’s self actualisation. The second is to stay true to the brand’s self image. The first is about discovery, the second is a known target, though it might be a shifting one. Either way, the brand is being true to itself – it understands the business aspect, and in its own selfish interest will tend towards doing right by the customer. If it doesn’t, customers will see through it at some point. I can’t say for sure which one of these drives Nike. I can give you a gimmick example though – Revolve and their fat shaming posturing, which is having them sweat it out now!

In summation, I believe that a brand having a worldview is a strategic imperative. Its customers win because they are associated with a brand that echoes their world view and feeds their self image. Happy customers gives the brand a win in business. If you really think about it, Nike isn’t really sacrificing anything. They’re betting, knowing the odds. Smart move for individuals, smart move for a brand too!

Bonus read: Great thread on decision making

P.S. The memes have been hilarious. This is one of my favourites.

(via)

It has been a while since I wrote about nation states, or notion states as I call them. Now is not really a good time to bring this up in India, but hey, it’s a free country. Oh, wait! Therefore, let’s talk about Apple vs the FBI on where digital security ends and national security begins. (via The Guardian) Washington-Silicon Valley shadowboxing as the publication puts it, and Apple has the support of Google, Facebook and Twitter. [If this were happening in India, by now Tim Cook would have probably been lynched by a mob, and charged for sedition – now a very loose word that can be applied to even things such as sneezing while watching the Republic Day parade on TV]

This battle is interesting as it is because it will set a precedent for an individual’s privacy rights, and is being fought between the world’s most valuable corporation and the world’s biggest (one might even say only) superpower. On one side, we have and entity whose decisions affect billions of lives around the world, and on the other, a country marked by boundaries but influencing policies that affect an equal number. Phenomenally intriguing and layered as this is, I actually find it riveting because I see a couple of my favourite narratives coming to a boil.

One is that of Bits vs Atoms. The nation state is a product of geography (atoms) and despite its hardware prowess, Apple has a strong foundation of ‘bits’. In that sense, it is a collision of worlds, and as Venkatesh Rao eloquently puts it, When software eats hardware, however, we can physically or virtually recreate hardware as necessary, imbuing transient atoms with the permanence of bits.

The other is from Finite and Infinite Games and involves how the species chooses to be organised – the concepts of society and culture. Broadly, the nation state represents society and Apple could represent culture. To quote, “In their own political engagements infinite players make a distinction between society and culture. Society they understand as the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture as whatever we do with each other by undirected choice.”

The friction between the corporation and the nation state will only increase, and I am reasonably sure that the winner, even if it may not be evident immediately, will be the corporation. Unfortunately, while that dominance might be relatively better than what we have now, it has tons of challenges – arising mostly from the motivation of the corporation. It’s not an altruistic enterprise after all, and at this point, largely operates on what has been termed captology, from an acronym for “computers as persuasive technology.” (read) It has the capability to massively influence our thoughts without us even realising it.

The hope remains that at some point, the victors will move their focus from meaningful to profound – a nuance brought up by Scott Galloway in the “Gang of Four”. But it is only a hope, and that’s why I fear that even ‘culture’ in the near future as propagated by the victorious ‘bits’ will be within the scope of ‘society’, and therefore inauthentic. That, I guess, will persist till the species recognises life as the infinite game it is. Until then, I for one, welcome our new overlords!

(via Threadless)

A conversation in office on an unrelated topic led me to ask this question on Twitter.

A conversation made me think – are we more ok with business ideas/models being aped compared to creative ideas? If so, why?

— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) April 15, 2013

..and @atulkarmakar gave me his perspectives

@atulkarmarkar exactly, why the different rules?

— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) April 15, 2013

@atulkarmarkar hmm, that does not apply to ads no?

— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) April 15, 2013

@atulkarmarkar in fact ads is what made me think of it in the first place

— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) April 15, 2013

Just like Atul mentioned, I had first considered whether it was because creative ideas were considered more personal  and a business idea/model an impersonal, corporate entity. But my starting point had been advertising, to which this does not really apply. Compare the reactions of Company A replicating Company B’s business model/idea versus them being ‘inspired’ by their advertising. In the case of advertising, both agencies might get paid and both clients might benefit. But in the case of a business, the second player could benefit from the mistakes (strategy/execution) of the pioneer and build a more successful business. That would be really unfair to the first guy whose business idea might have been a really creative solution to some need. And yet, it’s more likely that the aping of ads would spark a larger debate and the business cloning would be ignored. Am I missing something? Any perspectives you want to share?

until next time, game of clones