How Brands Become Activists A critical analysis of Brand Activism

Consumer behaviors are shaped by a desire to express and support political and ethical perspectives. Therefore, brand advertising communication increasingly employs strategies that include social and political values. However, not only are they communicating social and political values, brands also voluntarily take a stance on what they think is good for society. This increasingly popular corporate strategy has been defined as brand activism. Through brand activism, values that are traditionally linked to social movements and are initially discussed in political or private conversations, enter the advertising sphere. Therefore, this strategy can be considered as ethically problematic: is it ethically 'right' to cover profit-raising goals with presenting social and political values connected to social activist aims? Numerous critical studies have examined on micro-level how advertising mass communication "persuade" and "manipulate" consumers. Since brand ctivism is an emerging research field, the specific occurring advertising phenomenon has not been approached extensively critically by academics yet. This research aims to assess brand activism critically as a persuasive advertising strategy that creates political and social meaning by communicating political and social values and taking a stance. The main research question reads: how do brands claim discourses of social activism and sets of moral values embedded in their visual video communication? A qualitative, critical discourse analysis is sufficient for answering the main research question. Critical discourse analysis is the appropriate method for this study since CDA typically analyses texts and visuals and exposes strategies that appear neutral initially, but which may actually seek to shape representation of events and persons with a particular goal. Since this study concerns the in-depth study of brand activism, data selection had to match the predefined profile of brand activism in advertising. Furthermore, this study selected its data from the winner list of the Cannes Lions International Festival Creativity. This decision ensures a certain level of quality and professionalism of the selected data. During the analysis, the legitimization framework of Van Leeuwen (2007) was an assisting framework to identify discursive strategies that legitimize the claim on social activist discourses and sets of moral values. The findings of this study present that brands claim activist discourses and sets of moral values by multiple discursive strategies: inclusion of third parties (The Media, The Famous and the Experts), by actually undertaking action with focus on specific outcomes, by creating a ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ framework through moral evaluation and by four different brand activist narratives (‘Frontline Activist’, ‘Collaborator’, ‘Whistleblower’, ‘Hidden Activist’). The implications of these findings outline a brand activist discourse in which brands are not mentioning commercial activity. Brand are above all concerned about the activist brand image and undertaking action, which can be interpreted as misleading.