Commodity Activism in a Racial Context Essay

Introduction

The practice of branding and promoting a product is usually understood as a complex economic tool. It is a method that deals with attaching social or cultural meaning to a commodity as a means to take it more personally resonant with an individual consumer (Jenkins, 2013). Commodity activism resulted from the process of branding and is referred to as the process by which social action is being perceived through the ways it is embedded into merchandising practices, incentives, and corporate profits (Mukherjee & Banet-Weiser, 2012). Commodity activism, in its essence, means acting politically within and through the culture of commodities (Coombe, 2017). Therefore, it is a political engagement strategy that bridges the gap between a certain political agenda and a commodity – a consumer who purchases a product may be supporting a socio-political message that a brand is promoting (Adams, 2019). In the racial context, commodity activism will use the political discussions of racial and racial tensions to comment on them and use their narratives in marketing campaigns (Sobande, 2020). The ethics of the practice is to be debated because of the different approaches that organizations have to commodity activism (Jones, 2019). Although, the exploration of the concept in the racial context is necessary for revealing how organizations use the message of diversity for strengthening brand reputation.

Historical Context of Racism in Promotional Culture

The explicit and formal ideologies of white supremacy and white privilege have been overturned beginning in the 1960s and the popularisation of the Civil Rights Movement striving for equality. However, the exploration of the modern-day marketing culture has shown that there are new advertising practices that have transposed previous racial schemata into new settings (Sallaz, 2010). As suggested by Sallaz (2010, p. 294) in their study on the ethnography of marketing practices, the target audience of potential consumers was perceived by white marketing managers as “whities” versus denigrated “darkies.” Further discourse into the perspectives on race in the market found that survey data for campaigns often divided the market into “blue-collar” and “jazz” types, which enabled the structuring of the marketing strategies to repel the latter and attract the former (Sallaz, 2010).

Since the last decade has been characterized by critical social developments concerning the role of race, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, advertisers can no longer target white consumers and repel individuals of color (De Choudhury et al., 2016). Companies have been encouraged to get to the drawing board and adjust their advertising in accordance with the new standards and issue the long-awaited apologies and “lessons learned” (Chiu, 2019). Because of this, commodity activism has become widely used to fit the mainstream agenda, even if organizations’ visions do not align with the message that is being communicated. When commodity activism is used in this way, it is unethical because companies promote messages of equality for their financial or reputational gain.

Exploring Campaigns

The examples of commodity activism in advertisement campaigns are numerous. Brands may choose to capitalize on political or social messages to present a particular image of themselves (Vredenburg et al., 2020). This paper aims to study two examples of commodity activism, one represented by McDonald’s Snapchat hiring campaign and the French government campaign to denounce chronic racial discrimination. Both campaigns have received broad coverage in the media as examples of commodity activism and the pushing of the diversity agenda. The importance of analyzing the two campaigns lies in the possibility of showing how companies are using commodity activism to capture a target audience that shares their political views and promotes the messages of equality without considering the implications of using an agenda for a promotion.

McDonald’s is a company with a long history that has inevitably faced criticism regarding discrimination in its hiring decision. In February 2021, McDonald’s made a dedication to increasing the participation of women and minorities in executive positions in the light of the recent discrimination lawsuits (Ghosh, 2021). Paying attention to the way in which the company approaches its recruitment decisions in the light of commodity activism may show whether it aims to improve representation in the public eye or will facilitate tangible and long-term change (Kibert et al., 2020). The recent hiring campaign implemented by McDonald’s focused on attracting and recruiting diverse workers in their desired age range, usually between 16 and 24 years old (Lindman, 2020). Because the target demographic for the hiring campaign is young, Snapchat was chosen as a recruitment channel that can be attractive to the intended audience. The campaign began as ten-second employer branding videos of employees showcasing their experience working at McDonald’s like a call to action. It received traction and got an estimated three thousand applications within the first day (Lindman, 2020). The use of Snapchat showed how the company successfully resonated with its target audience and focused on diverse candidates because no discriminatory or limiting boundaries were established for the job applications.

In the diverse context, the campaign has shown to be particularly successful in Saudi Arabia, with McDonald’s receiving more than 42,000 applications from job hopefuls in the country (Campaign Staff, 2019). For kicking off the campaign, the Snapchat filter was disseminated among ten influences in the Kingdom who shared their stories and advertised the campaign throughout the country. While the campaign was well-received, the implications of technology related to its implementation have not been considered. Because McDonald’s had a specific target audience in mind, the campaign that used Artificial Intelligence created virtual gardens and transferred only the content that the technology ‘thought’ that the audience would like (Yaffe-Bellany, 2019). As a result, the Snapchat campaign was shown only to young and prospective employees who used social media often, thus discriminating against more experienced workers that could have also contributed to McDonald’s.

Similar to McDonald’s call to action for improving diversity in the workplace by opening the hiring process to a broad audience online, the Government of France launched a poster campaign against racism in the hiring sphere (FRANCE24, 2016). The campaign entailed using massive billboards intended to denounce systematic racial discrimination in the French workplace. Each poster has two sides, with one side showing a white candidate for a job and another showing a candidate of color. On the side with the white applicant, there are such captions as “you can start on Monday” or “welcome to the team” (FRANCE24, 2016). On the other side, the captions say “we will get back to you” or “sorry we are not recruiting” (FRANCE24, 2016). The kind of discrimination that is shown in the campaign is concerned with the ongoing and systematic unethical recruitment policies, prejudices, and sometimes laziness on the part of company managers (Safi, 2017). The campaign bears importance to the discussion of commodity activism as its creators aimed to appeal to a large demographic to promote a socially important message that has gained major traction.

Conclusion

The exploration of diversity campaigns in the advertisement industry as related to recruitment has shown that companies would transfer the messages of accountability and transparency to appeal to their audiences (Dwivedi et al., 2020). The issue with commodity activism used in this way is that companies use extensive marketing efforts to persuade the audience to choose a position that is favorable to the organization engaging in promotional efforts (Repo, 2020). The popularization of diversity-themed commodities is intended to entangle the audience into engagement with the brand, with the interactions giving traction to the organization and pushing its agenda to the masses (Jespersen, 2019). Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has become clear that advertising and brand managers need to use such strategies as commodity activism to capture the attention of more progressive and technologically-savvy consumers by appealing to their emotions, affect, and social responsibility (Hearn, 2012). Because of this, within the multi-dimensional context of branding, marketing campaigns are essential for encouraging consumers to develop deep emotional relationships (Kim & Sullivan, 2019).

Neoliberalist, technological, and cultural perspectives on promotional methods have allowed to support and validate the political economy in which the consuming subjects and political culture are closely interconnected (Hearn, 2012). The political shift under the influence of new media convergence and the unified forms of cultural production has been associated with social activism experiences and their impact on the way brands are expected to present themselves (Pottinger, 2015). Thus, both the campaigns explored earlier, such as McDonald’s dedication to promoting inclusiveness in its hiring efforts and the French government’s ads calling employers to stop racially profiling their candidates, are examples of commodity activism rooted in the change of public perspectives on race and equality.

Today, when an organization shows signs of racial discrimination, it is likely that the public will notice quickly and show their disapproval. Commodity activism merges consumer behaviors with political or social goals. Because of this, corporations and even governments have been encouraged to question the unfairness and the lack of diversity within the social sphere, relying upon and reflecting the most fundamental cultural and social relations. In the light of the Black Lives Matter movement, the public views on racism’s pervasiveness have taken a hard turn over the past several years, with more and more people reaching an agreement that discrimination must not be tolerated (Russonello, 2020). Thus, the objective of marketing campaigns, which used to divide potential consumers into “blue-collar” and “jazz” types, is to try not to alienate the audience but to instead broaden the spectrum. The French Labor Ministry’s promotion, for example, shows the implications of racial injustice within the overtly sexist and racist recruitment policies that companies exhibit when hiring workers (European Network Against Racism, 2017). Similarly, McDonald’s cannot afford to show discriminatory hiring practices because its reputation is put on the line when it is revealed that its executives are predominantly male and white (Ghosh, 2021). Therefore, it is one of the main objectives of advertisers to show brands in the most favorable light possible regarding diversity and inclusion, and it can often be problematic as commodity activism allows for the pushing of a narrative that is favored by the masses.

References

Adams, P. (2019) The year of ‘woke washing’: how tone-deaf activism risks eroding brands. Web.

Campaign Staff. (2019) ‘McDonald’s recruitment campaign on Snapchat receives more than 42,000 “Snaplications” from Saudi job hopefuls’,Middle East Campaign. Web.

Chiu, B. (2019) ‘Addressing the ad industry’s sticky problem with race’,Forbes. Web.

Coombe, R. (2016) ‘The knowledge economy and its cultures: neoliberal technologies and Latin American reterritorializations’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(3), 247-275.

De Choudhury, M., Jhaver, S., Sugar, B. & Weber, I. (2016) ‘Social media participation in an activist movement for racial equality’, Proceedings of the… International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2016, pp. 92-101.

Dwivedi, Y., Ismagilova, E., Hughes, L., Carlson, J., Filieri, R., Jacobson, J., Jain, V., Karjaluoto, H., Kefi, H., Krishen, A., Kumar, V., Rahman, M., Raman, R., Rauschnabel, P., Rowley, J., Salo, J., Tran, G. & Wang, Y. (2020) ‘Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: perspectives and research propositions’, International Journal of Information Management, pp. 102168.

European Network Against Racism. (2017) Racism & discrimination in employment in Europe 2013-2017. Web.

Ghosh, P. (2021) ‘McDonald’s vows to increase women and minorities in executive ranks amid discrimination lawsuits’,Forbes. Web.

Hearn, A. (2012) Commodity activism: brand me “activist.” Web.

Jenkins, J. (2013) Thinking critically about brand cultures: an interview with Sarah Banet-Weiser (part two).Web.

Jespersen, S. (2019) ‘How to go beyond engagement to entanglement’,Forbes. Web.

Jones, O. (2019) ‘Woke-washing: how brands are cashing in on the culture wars’,The Guardian. Web.

Kibert, C., Thiele, L., Peterson, A. & Monroe, M. (2020) The ethics of sustainability. Web.

Kim, Y-K. & Sullivan, P. (2019). ‘Emotional branding speaks to consumers’ heart: the case of fashion brands’, Fashion and Textiles, 6, 1-10.

Lindman, S. (2020) Recruiting on Snapchat? McDonald’s did and reached 300+ million candidates. Web.

Mukherjee, R. & Banet-Weiser, S. (2012) Commodity activism: cultural resistance in neoliberal times. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Pottinger, L. (2015) ‘Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser (eds), commodity activism: cultural resistance in neoliberal times’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 15(2), 277-283.

Repo, J. (2020) ‘Feminist commodity activism: the new political economy of feminist protest’,International Political Sociology, 14(2), pp. 215-232. Web.

Russonello, G. (2020) ‘Why most Americans support the protests’, The New York Times. Web.

Safi, M. (2017) ‘Promoting diversity in French workplaces: targeting and signaling ethnoracial origin in a colorblind context’,Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2017. Web.

Sallaz, J. (2010) ‘Talking race, marketing culture: the racial habitus in and out of apartheid’, Social Problems, 57(2), pp. 294-314. Web.

Sobande, F. (2020) ‘Woke-washing: “Intersectional” femvertising and branding “woke” bravery’, European Journal of Marketing. Web.

Vredenburg, J., Kapitan, S., Spry, A. & Kemper, J. (2020) ‘Brands taking a stand: authentic brand activism or woke washing?’ Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 39(4), 1-50.

Yaffe-Bellany, D. (2019) ‘Would you like fries with that? McDonald’s already knows the answer’, The New York Times. Web.