In April, the public backlash against Pepsi’s epically tone-deaf ad with Kendall Jenner both highlighted the degree to which brands are using activism to sell, and the risks of doing so. 11&more took a step back to look at the pros and cons of brand activism.

Is it ok to do good in order to sell? Do the ends justify the means?

A Guardian article from earlier in the year showed just how savvy brands have gotten. For example, when customers boycotted Uber in late Jan because of the belief that the company had undermined a taxi strike at JFK airport protesting Trump’s immigration ban, Lyft’s CEO Logan Green tweeted the next day that the company had donated $1M to the ACLU. Starbucks’ Howard Schultz responded to the political climate with an open letter to staff in which he committed to hiring 10,000 refugees, while Airbnb’s Brian Chesky tweeted that the company was offering free accommodation to anyone not allowed in the US. The article didn’t object to these actions, but it did point out that brands aren’t doing them out of altruism.

Businesses support social causes—and always make sure that their customers know about it—because activism is good for business.

It’s not just brands who use altruism for their own ends

Eugene (researcher in biomedical engineering, based in Sheffield, UK): I think we tend to focus on the negative aspects of brand names, such as their tax avoidance strategies, instead of focusing on their social impact. We do forget that any good accountant worth their salt would be trying to minimize outgoings as much as possible by exploiting any loophole available to them. Do such measures then get cancelled out if Amazon, Starbucks or Google go ahead with projects like bringing broadband to the third world? In this age, philanthropy seems to be the quickest way to warm the hearts and empty the pockets of consumers.

Also, I don’t think that brands are the only ones, or even the first to exploit altruism. I don’t know how the culture is elsewhere but one of my pet gripes while studying in the UK was the phrase “it’s for charity” which appeared every time a friend wanted me to pay (somewhat) exorbitant prices to watch an amateur quality student performance or to sponsor them to do something unremarkable for their physical ability, such as a 1km walk—see Gap Yah 2 for an example.

This seemed a passive aggressive way to “raise awareness” and to justify the ticket fee or sponsorship amount. Tim Minchin sums up the culture well with his song F*ck the Poor. It was presumably only a matter of time before large brands jumped on board this ship too. In fact, companies such as Krispy Kreme (the UK arm) were relatively early adopters of this activism-based marketing as early as 2005 (maybe even earlier), by making their doughnuts available at a lower rate if they were being sold on for charity fundraising events.

Does raising awareness through brands distract from the real work of making change happen?

Joy (Ph.D. student researching education and social structures, based in Berkeley, USA): On that note, check out fashion’s latest latest trend—protesting.

I appreciated your comments Eugene. I always get a little itchy with brand activism. It seems like there are some contradictory threads to it.

On the one hand, raising awareness can be rad and useful. On the other hand, I think “awareness” and “consciousness” can serve as a stand-in for actual material change (people feeling super woke and accomplished because they have a t-shirt with an activist phrase, but not changing their practices or society in any material way).

There’s just something so paradoxical about it. And I’m not coming down hard on this trend across the board—it does seem like it can do some powerful things and bring important conversations into the spotlight. But if the extent of this activism is to “warm the hearts and empty the pockets”….seems like it might actually do more harm than good in co-opting movements and undermining the real work that needs to be done.

Jia Jia (business transformation consultant, based in New York): As someone who worked in the ad industry, I have to say that creating campaigns which tell great stories or launch social or creative initiatives is way more fun and satisfying than churning out ads that hardsell. And incidentally, this kind of work is more effective at selling these days because audiences don’t have the choice to skip crappy ads.

With brand activism, I’m a pragmatist. I tend to filter it at three levels:

1. Pure talk: Costs the brand nothing. I give the brand no points for that.

2. Talk + short term or one-off initiative: Basically the business is either re-directing their marketing budget for a season or making a one-off move that impacts short-term budget but not overall strategy. Better than nothing but undeserving of all the media hype.

3. Long term initiative: This is what I really care about since it shows that the business is making strategic investments to support social impact. But this doesn’t typically get covered since long-term evolutions in strategy do not make sexy tweets that brands and users can pass on to garner instant cultural cachet.

As for whether brand activism distracts from the real work to be done, I don’t think so, because I don’t think that brand activism occupies the same mental space as real activism. Rather, it occupies the same space as consumption and lifestyle.

When I buy into Starbucks’ fair trade practices and vote with my wallet, I’m giving up my interest in a competing coffee brand. If I really cared about the work that has to be done, I’d support an organization that directly represented coffee farmers—to Starbucks and others—and I’d buy coffee.

In my view, a lot of people are too lazy for real activism but they’re not too lazy to consume—brand activism’s just the latest consumable. Real activism, as always, remains something that’s tough to activate for comfortable people leading consumerist lives. I guess I’m just echoing Tim Minchin’s brilliant F*ck the Poor that Eugene pointed to.

In the long run, “conscious consumerism” does move society forward…to a degree

James (brand and business transformation consultant, based in New York): What I find encouraging about the trend is that it’s forcing the public to get smart about which of those three levels that Jia Jia outlined their preferred companies fall into in terms of their brand activism efforts. In a day and age where there is so much access to information and demand for authenticity, those whose strategies, products, services, operations, and marketing initiatives aren’t deeply rooted in values and don’t align with the expectations of an increasingly socially conscious consumer are going to lose credibility, and ultimately, market share. Uber’s a case in point.

I think “conscious consumerism” is going to be a really important form of activism in the coming years. Brands aren’t going to be able to fake it anymore just for cool points or good PR.

Jia Jia: I agree with James that the socially conscious consumer is an important force, even though the purist in me really chafes at the fact that people aren’t being as socially conscious or systemically effective as they think they are—paying attention to one announcement from Lyft or Starbucks doesn’t a movement make.

Sometimes, socially conscious consumers have gotten overzealous about an issue with insufficient understanding.

For example, in 1995, Greenpeace campaigning forced Royal Dutch Shell to dismantle the Brent Spar drilling platform on-shore rather than sinking it in deep seas, but Greenpeace later admitted that it had used faulty pollution estimates to halt the campaign. It’s not clear which option would have been better for the environment. Shell thought that deep sea disposal would have posed less threat to resource-rich shallow water environments; Greenpeace argued that no one could know the ramifications of deep sea disposal.

All that said though, I think that socially conscious consumerism does work in the long term. CSR used to be known as “greenwashing” because companies basically wrote fancy paragraphs in their annual report without taking real action. But increasingly, as consumers came to expect certain things (like fair trade coffee) as basics for doing business, as social media made it easier to release unflattering corporate info, and as maturing Millennials applied more conscious consumer values in our job search/ work, CSR has become critical to a company’s strategy.

After Nike got shamed in the 90s for running sweatshops, the company re-looked its entire supply chain to figure out better ways to treat its workers. All big brands are under pressure to be more accountable along their supply chain; even Apple came under fire a few years ago for its environmental footprint.

So I guess I see consumer activism as a way for consumers to express intent, and then it’s up to the companies to innovate ways to realize that intent. And usually, they come up with ways that not only treat many parts of the system better and also deliver more profits more elegantly (i.e. with fewer systemic flaws like pollution or exploitation). But, I think we’ll eventually hit a limit.

I do not buy into the theory that endless economic growth (driven by consumption) is sustainable. Consumer activism will help the current system function better but I think we’ll eventually need a whole new system altogether, not beholden to market-driven growth.

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By: Eugene, James, Jia Jia, Joy