Hi,
Pride month is here – and so is the gaggle of brands piggybacking on it to score brownie points (and some serious profits).
"Pride marketing" or "Pride branding", an offshoot of a nexus between corporations and a section of diversity and inclusion advocates, can be inherently exploitative. As a cis-het, upper-caste Indian man, I was recently alerted to an insidious form of this exploitation by my friend Rajvi Mariwala.
Rajvi leads Mariwala Health Initiative, a mental health funding and advocacy organisation that is doing stupendous work in supporting marginalised communities. In a video message, she took on businesses that invite representatives from the LGBTQ+ community to deliver feelgood "awareness" programmes that burnish their brands – but refuse to give them their dues as legitimate experts.
"Companies, brands, diversity and inclusion advocates: many of you ask queer people to share their stories to educate and raise awareness. This means you are relying on experts and experience who are using their lives, their activism, their intellectual and emotional labour. But why aren’t experts by experience treated the same way as HR experts or strategy experts?"
An MBA grad who’s sat through one session on diversity and inclusion cannot be better qualified than somebody with lived experience, Rajvi said. Pride month "shouldn’t be an exercise in awareness" but in engaging with the movement’s history.
Organise all the workshops you want. Just compensate people for their efforts.
Charity isn’t enough
Following Rajvi’s powerful message, I happened upon a great article on another problematic aspect of pride month: the sales jamboree it unleashes in the name of solidarity and allyship.
Alex Abad-Santos, a journalist at Vox, points out in his article how giant consumer brands – from J.Crew to Nordstrom to Bloomingdale’s to SoulCycle (“All Souls Welcome”) to McDonald’s to H&M, Nike, and Lululemon – colour up in rainbow shades every June and stock their outlets with Pride-ready wares.
Some donate a portion of their earnings to LGBTQ+ charities. In 2018, when Abad-Santos wrote his article, J.Crew was donating 50% of the purchase price of its Pride T-shirts, while H&M had set aside only 10% of the sales from its “Pride Out Loud” collection.
Any contribution is good – except the article argues that buying Pride-themed french fries and feeling you’ve done enough actually does great damage to the real politics of pride month.
It also points out corporate duplicity: H&M has operations in China, a country with a history of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Likewise, Gilead, a major pharmaceutical company with a drug that can potentially prevent HIV infections, has sponsored big Pride events, but it also has a history of not doing enough to make its drugs more affordable and accessible for more people.
"It’s hard to shake the feeling that this commercialised mass appeal has helped further dampen pride month’s fiery political roots, and helped obfuscate the less-pleasant, less-talked-about issues that matter for many people in the LGBTQ+ community – and will continue to matter long after the rainbow T-shirts, socks, water bottles, and cute retail disappear from store windows," Abad-Santos writes.
Of course, pride month 2020 is different. A pandemic has dampened many parades and forced events to go virtual. And marketers have lost some of their love. An article on the marketing and branding news platform Digiday quotes a person in the know: "The excitement and enthusiasm [of pride month] comes from the camaraderie of being in one space. You can make a hashtag or do a viral campaign, but that doesn’t have the same impact of walking down a parade route."
"Don’t give a F***" meal, anyone?
All of this reminded me of a similar corporate-driven trend taking shape in the mental health space. Remember Burger King’s "Real Meals" in association with Mental Health America? ("No one is happy all the time. And that’s okay.")
The wellness industry is a multitrillion-dollar bounty, and all manner of companies, from fast food joints to fashion and beauty heavies like Saks Fifth Avenue and Sephora, want in.
I read a great sentence in a Medium post that sums up the zeitgeist: "Over the years, brands have figured out that appealing to our emotions and morality, rather than just our desires, is especially profitable."
What are your thoughts on capitalism’s takeover of causes? Write to me.
Stay safe. See you next week.
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