Cause-led marketing could backfire on brands but it’s marketers who are responsible for pushing it too far

So, here’s the deal. At the most basic, transactional level, brands are about exchange. Consumers hand over their money and the brand provides a good quality product or service that they need or desire.

Is the price fair? If it isn’t, they won’t hand over their money.

Can the quality be relied on? That is what brands are for: to offer predictability and reassurance that everything is as it should be. If not, next time they won’t hand over their money.

What about environmental and societal responsibility? These days that is table stakes. If a brand fails here, it is not only a consumer’s right, but arguably a duty to decline to hand over their money.

Looking at things from this strictly transactional viewpoint, the recent attempt by some citizens in London’s Walthamstow to block the opening of a Gail’s bakery in their neighbourhood seems superfluous. Why put words on a petition – ‘A threat to the uniqueness of our high street’, ‘Overshadowing much-loved local stores’ – when the eloquent language of the marketplace will do the talking for you?

Today’s activists have every right to use the branding landscape as terrain on which to fight ideological battles. And the reason behind that is simple: it was us – we marketers – who started it.

If the 1,500 or so people who signed the now famous Change.org online document are representative of the borough’s populace, then too few will be handing over their money to make the new Gail’s viable. The cinnamon buns might be to die for, the ambiance pleasant, the prices just about OK, but if the perceived menace to the neighbourhood is felt by all, it is those beloved local competitors that will be hoovering up everyone’s money.

Some of the signatories of the petition had no intention of keeping things at a transactional level, though. In comments under the petition copy, they let the true reasons for their revulsion show. The brand’s chairman and part-owner, Luke Johnson, has openly espoused views they deem unacceptable: pro-Brexit, anti-lockdown, sceptical about net zero, hostile to Hamas – an ideological bundle they label ‘far right’.

The protest, then, has morphed from parochial squabble to political activism – where the expected arrival of a branded bakery is used as leverage to marginalise certain views as ‘hateful’, while promoting the opposing worldview.

It was this aspect that made the story newsworthy and the commentariat angry. Conspicuously foaming at the mouth was the Daily Telegraph’s Brendan O’Neill, who accused “the insufferably woke residents of Walthamstow” of “ideological nimbyism”, before laying into the audacity of their implied requirement that every café, shop and brand “should accord precisely with their beliefs”.

He is off the mark. Today’s activists have every right to use the branding landscape as terrain on which to fight ideological battles. And the reason behind that is simple: it was us – we marketers – who started it.

The era of activist branding

When the history of branding comes to be written it will be noted there came a point at which the word ‘transactional’ was regarded as a put-down.

Marketers working to the old paradigm of claims, benefits and quality reassurance were encouraged – by peers, by thought leaders and especially by agencies – to rise above transaction altogether. The new paradigm was to express a brand point of view on higher-order societal themes.

And in truth, it can be effective, boosting awareness, deepening emotional engagement and helping attract committed employees. With one proviso: that the brand maintains the ties of relevance to its category and its role in people’s lives.

Some rose to the challenge and did it well. Unilever’s Dove showed the way with its relevant, global-scale overturning of beauty stereotypes, executed always with empathy and charm.

Then every marketer everywhere wanted to ‘Do a Dove’, but make it bigger, braver, more contentious. As a result, they strayed ever further from the brand’s centre of gravity and the tone became more activist than ally.

So, Lux soap – another beauty brand from the Unilever stable – took up the gauntlet against the ‘societal bombardment’ of ‘everyday sexist judgments’.

What’s dangerous is our tendency as an industry to take things to extremes and drive this cause-led approach to altitudes too lofty for mere brands to scale.

Fashion retailer Jigsaw ventured even further from its category moorings with its uncompromising pro-immigration stance, captured in high-impact transport posters.

Perhaps the retailer took its cue from an earlier campaign from Italian fashion brand Benetton, which abjured images of clothing to focus on incongruent societal issues. One ad showed a man at the point of dying from AIDS, a haunting image about as far away as you could get from the brightly coloured knitwear sold in its stores.

This was a thrilling time for marketers, who could now step into their cubicles as culture warriors with a cause, bent on righting wrongs and changing the world. But unlike true activists they also had shareholders to please and a bottom line to nurture. There was still that tiresome, base-level transactional stuff to get right.

Gradually the tension between serving customers and at the same time confronting them became unbearable. So, we got to the point where Halifax, when asked by customers why the bank was taking a stand on gender fluidity, responded that they were welcome to take their accounts elsewhere.

It wasn’t long before upmarket bank Coutts trumped that, abruptly expelling its customer Nigel Farage for not “aligning” with its “values and purpose”, labelling him a “disingenuous grifter” in the process.

Note the ad hominem parallels. A brand smacks a customer in the face for holding what it considers the wrong sort of political views. A community seeks to repel a brand while hitting out at its chairman for the same alleged failing. It’s not particularly edifying on either side. But it was branding that landed the first blow.

Where we are now?

Nothing has changed and everything has. What’s timeless is our dependence on consumers to willingly part with their hard-earned money and feel good on all levels about what they get back in return. We should be less squeamish about celebrating the benefits of that exchange, do more to continuously improve it and rescue the word ‘transactional’ from its dungeon of shame.

What’s changed in a good way is that brands have also found new routes into people’s consciousness that go beyond hammering them with repeated claims – the welcome difference between ‘Washes whiter’ and ‘Dirt is good’.

What’s dangerous is our tendency as an industry to take things to extremes and drive this cause-led approach to altitudes too lofty for mere brands to scale – as Budweiser and Pepsi have recently learned to their cost.

So, here’s the deal. We can respect cause-led branding as just one route among many to deepen our engagement with consumers, with the caveat that we keep a sense of both proportion and context, so that our societal aims do not exceed our capability reach.

Or we can continue to hitch our brands to ever more contentious and disconnected themes in the culture wars in an effort to stand out at all costs – and accept that all brands, even those as innocuous as Gail’s, are going to get caught in the crossfire.