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Can you just be ‘woke’ as a brand or will that be punished by consumers – and investors? And can a popular celeb or influencer lose star status – and with it brand value – by 1 wrong step? I look at the use of rainbow diversity in communication and the woke aspect of it*.

If your communication deviates from “the norm” (from 1970) and you don’t just talk about the product anymore, but instead load your brand with lifestyle elements – then some people apparently have to get used to that. If you take it one step further and you use themes that have to do with diversity, people don’t understand it at all: Get Woke, Go Broke. I often come across this within the various platforms of my PhD research Marketing the Rainbow.

Get woke, go broke

Originally written by writer John Ringo, the phrase “Get woke, go broke” became a controversial term to refer to commercial organizations that would suffer a financial loss through socially just campaigns. For example, the 2019 Gillette We Believe The Best Men Can Be advertisement about toxic masculinity received a lot of criticism. Parent company Procter & Gamble, which had previously bought the brand for $57 billion, wrote off $8 billion, but a direct link between the two things seems a bit far-fetched to me. Nike went a little more subtle with the Kaepernick campaign and, despite protests and a boycott, added an additional $6 billion.

Does a brand worry about that? Is there bad publicity? Gillette explained that the brand wants to make the connection with the Millennials, ‘because they should all be woke’.

“We weren’t trying to stir controversy,” said Pankaj Bhalla, Gillette’s brand director. “We were just trying to upgrade the story we’ve had for 30 years – the Best a Man Can Get – and make it relevant. I don’t think our intention was to have controversy for the sake of controversy.”

37 million views later, the like and dislike counter is at 835K:1,6M, so 1:2 (without the option of commenting). So it’s not that bad and there were also many vocal proponents (including celebs).

The advertisement quoted Hanneke Faber, Unilever’s marketing boss, who swears by the quarrel formula. “Brands must dare to make enemies. Rather a lot of brand haters than a brand as a ship sailing past in the night, unnoticed by the masses. If you have enemies, you usually have fans. If that’s enough, then you’re a winner.”

About that product

It is always the conservatives among us who expect Coca-Cola to only show how good those bubbles taste. That Volvo is just telling us how well their automobilium is put together to transport you. And possibly your family, but that must consist of your wife (because of course the man is addressed in a car advertisement) and your son and daughter.

Apparently Coca-Cola wanted to make the world sing as early as 1971. Also that IKEA disrupted the traditional face in 1994 by putting two men at a kitchen table (preceded by Amev in 1992 with all kinds of “deviant” forms of cohabitation). But with the disappearance of geographic boundaries as well as any moral-and-ethical filter with the rise of social media, everyone has an opinion. And it will be voiced too. That “opinion” is in the vast majority of cases stolen from others, so originality is often lacking.

Burgers?

Cartoonist Stonetoss ran a four-panel comic in 2018 in which a man presents an ad for a hamburger company depicting a kiss between people of different races (diversity: check!). The manager wonders if the ad will help sell burgers. The closing image says “Citizens?” and that has subsequently gone viral in memes where users highlight something that deviates from its original purpose.

There are over 1,000 videos on the YouTube channel that illustrates my research. Some appear to meet a need, because the original brand withdrew the video, or it was in a language other than English with no subtitles. That then leads to a deluge of visitors and a cascade of commentary that the dogs don’t like to eat. Stonetoss really is paraphrased dozens, if not hundreds of times, and every poster beams with pleasure under the delusion of being original. So no – and also irrelevant. The cartoon was equally enjoyable, but when it comes to advertising, different rules apply. Because it is no longer about the product alone.

Hate posts

Last year I wrote about “From hate to endearment: The difference between the Cadbury kiss & the Doritos love story”. That was about two videos that went wild on my YouTube channel. It did keep me off the streets though, as I had my hands full reporting outrageous hate posts and Sodom & Gomorrah insults, and further moderating plain ugly comments. Both clips reached well over 200,000 views, with the hatred of Cadbury resulting in over 2,400 comments, while the sympathy for Doritos garnered just under 400 posts. I think it also shows that haters are more likely to post than lovers. The like:dislike ratios were 1:1.4 and 25:1, respectively. I think it’s pretty special that a video gets more dislikes than likes.

In any case, I see more and more “woke” in the comments and accusations against the sjw (social justice warrior), which are of course related to cancel culture.

Socially responsible

Woke so, but what does that stand for? According to Wikipedia, Woke is “an action term from American English that refers to a greater awareness of society.” The word comes from the Afro-American-English woken up (to wake up), also in the figurative sense ‘aware of racism problems’. But the term is also often used as an accusation of excessive attention to social injustices. So it could just be a nickname.

In more than a decade, the term has increasingly been used to mean ‘alert and aware of social inequality’, ie broader than racism – it was particularly widely used after the deaths of Michael Brown and the Black Lives Matter movement – but also with regard to other diversity and inclusiveness – and then you end up at my desk. And because BLM has in the meantime exposed the awareness of systematic racism, the conservatives can no longer act in good decency against it: so they turn their arrows at other gnats at the foundation of society.

The concept has been the subject of memes, sarcastic usage and criticism. John Cleese, for example, delivered a speech at the Cambridge Union this month. He wrote on Twitter: “I was looking forward to talking to the students at CU this Friday, but I hear someone there has been blacklisted for doing an impersonation of Hitler. I’m sorry I did the same thing on a Monty Python show, so I’m blacklisting myself before anyone else does.”

He called the Union’s rules “woke”. He would give a lecture as part of his documentary on cancel culture. Titled John Cleese: Cancel Me, he explores ‘why a new woke generation is trying to rewrite the rules about what may and may not be said’. But is it really about the new generation, and are the rules arbitrarily rewritten or is it about advancing insight?

Woketober: Doritos

In October there were 2 more clips that attracted attention. I wouldn’t have noticed them at first if they hadn’t gone wild on my YouTube channel.

The first was a return of Doritos Mexico. They had promised last year not to pinkwash – by only joining a Pride Parade or LGBT day – but to pay continuous attention to rainbow diversity with #PrideAllYear. Pure brand charge, showing the product casually for a few seconds. For All Saints’ Day (November 2) we see a Pixar-esque film about a family in the cemetery, where Uncle Albert has his post-mortem coming out. The materfamilias receives this with joy, after which the whole family is happy.

The video was viewed on their own channel even more than last year (18 million times in 2 weeks, compared to 14 million last year). But the reception was more negative. People are blaming PepsiCo for usurping an LGBT-themed major Mexican religious holiday. On the Doritos channel the ratio was still positive 45K:17K, but with me there were 4x as many dislikes as likes. This is mainly because I added English subtitles, which especially attracted American trolls who – with 20K views and almost 700 comments – sometimes want to interfere with what is happening south of the border.

Woketober: Bite Size Halloween

It was much worse with The New Nanny. You can tell from the size that it was an IG product. The video is part of the Hulu Bite Size Halloween collection of 18 short films shot by young queer filmmakers. Twix, Skittles and Snickers sponsored some of the ads, but they weren’t their commercials strictly speaking.

With this one, all the stops at the MAGA peeps: the ‘transgender agenda’ was pushed down their throats! Zeeman has already made it clear to us that a boy can wear a dress, but even in the time of Halloween, the American LGBT phobes thought that this was not possible. I would have objected more to that unexpectedly strange nanny and her rather violent response to a bully, but that really played a minor role with the reagents. Woke, disturbing and disgusting. NEVER again Twix, or any Mars product, was constantly sworn to us (let’s meet again in three months or so). Stonetoss passed by quite often, of course. There are 74K views to date and the ratio is at a fierce 1:9 and I have rarely seen that. Is it any wonder YouTube wants to hide those indicators?

Sports and brand equity

And woke is also making an appearance in sports. Aaron Rodgers, 37, quarterback for the Green Bay Packers from Wisconsin, until recently held the status of the NFL’s most beloved player. His net worth is estimated at $120 million. He was even a contender for the iconic TV classic Jeopardy! to present. But Rodgers gave a bizarre interview on SiriusXM about Covid-19 in November, after reports emerged that he had at best violated the truth when he previously claimed he had been “immunized” rather than fully vaccinated.

The good news was that this time he was more direct. The bad news was that he was probably far too honest for his own good. The interview featured an avalanche of anti-vaxxer buzzwords and well-known death eaters, unsuccessfully trying to prove he wasn’t “anti-vax.” He confirmed that his personal immunization protocol included ivermectin and then began protesting (yawning) “the woke mob” who disrespected him. He even threw in a wrong quote from Martin Luther King Jr. Lost cause, spectacular fall from favor – and he was subsequently unavailable to play with his team after testing positive for Covid-19.

His brand value also collapsed, and the long-standing sponsor State Farm immediately announced that he would be replacing him in upcoming statements. But “it would be inappropriate for us to comment on Aaron’s vaccination status,” they told AdAge. Naturally. The memes show, among other things, a Kaaron Rodgers (get it?).

Freedom versus responsibility

All those haters drive the algorithms and provide a lot of earned media. Cadbury had disabled their commentary (so everything got to me?) and a little while later removed the video altogether “because the campaign was over”, while there were still dozens of old clips on their channel. Hmm… or did they want to forget about this chapter as soon as possible?

Recently, a public academic discussion arose in the Netherlands about the tension between the freedom to say what you want and the scope for criticism within academia. In an interview in de Volkskrant in July, a number of academics expressed the fear that academic freedom is threatened by a group of woke students who sometimes assume on the basis of one word that they are woke or not. This would lead to self-censorship among teachers and students, which threatens academic freedom.

In another example in the Daily Mail that same month, a Harvard professor of evolutionary biology was criticized for insisting on using the term “pregnant women” and failing to clarify that trans men and non-binary individuals can also be pregnant. How politically correct do you have to be? How woke can you be?

Conclusion

Social awareness among marketers and brands, and in areas such as sports and academia, for example, is increasing. This is fueled, among other things, by the most tolerant generation ever, the Millennials. Social media trolls sputter in vain that it’s all getting too much for them, but it’s irreversible. A brand may therefore – well-considered – be socially aware, but that is not immediately woke. Certainly not if that word is absorbed in sarcasm and the swear word domain and thus loses its sincere responsibility.

* Inclusiveness and diversity – or rather equality – distinguishes the following characteristics: gender, ethnicity, age, sexual identity, physical disability and religion. Only the latter is a choice, and, like politics, is kept out of marketing and communication (as well as table discussions and family gatherings) as much as possible.

Alfred Verhoeven is a marketer and is in the final phase of his PhD research Marketing the Rainbow. He previously wrote for ILOVEGAY about Pronouns, About those rainbows, Alphabet soup, M&M’s and the lesbian invasion, Magnum and the lesbian wedding,  Marketing the Rainbow: the process and all that came before it, Sport and (un)sportmanship,  Why you need a supplier diversity program, BeNeLux LGBTIQ+ Business Chamber (BGLBC), From B2C and B2B to B2G and G2G (oh, and G2C), The Men from Atlantis, The other kind of cruising, Booking.com, Home Deco, Haters and trolls: the ‘letter to the editor’ of the 21st century, 5 Bizarre LGBT Videos, TRANSparency, Transgender persons as a target group, Matchmaking, 5 videos that went viral, From Representation To Respect, Cultural sensitivities and social involvement in marketing, 4 reasons to practice diversity and The Rules of Market Segmentation.