Is Your Cause Marketing Campaign Leaning Towards Tone-Deafness?
Whenever there’s a social issue trending on the internet, we witness hundreds of CSR campaigns hitting the market, quickly wanting to draw on the popularity and mostly, the emotion surrounding it. Cause Marketing has worked in the past, yes, but only when it has been genuine and didn’t contradict company practices.
According to a study published in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR), when a company is perceived as altruistic, its cause marketing campaigns are more persuasive, because consumers can see what the company does is congruent with its motives.
Something that isn’t in this study but we know is true anyway is if the consumers identify a campaign as uncaring, they won’t think twice before pulling the plug on the brand. The same is also true for any celebrity or influencer associating with the brand while it does that.
We still can’t forget the Pepsi-Kendall fiasco as it unfolded in 2017 starting with an ad trying to cash in on the widespread Black Lives Matter protests then. In this particular advertisement, Miss Jenner can be seen stepping out from a haute couture modelling shoot and handing her blonde wig over to a black woman before casually approaching an armed officer with a can of Pepsi winning an appreciative smile from him. There are obviously too many problems with this commercial. The first is the brand trying to leverage the ongoing protests against police brutality without actually trying to make a difference with its actions. You can’t state that you support a cause when in actuality, you’re only promoting your drink for god’s sake. Next, the reality of the BLM protests was far from the smiling faces of officers letting masses protest peacefully. In an attempt to not offend anyone, the cops or the protestors, Pepsi portrayed a very unrealistic image of what was happening and somehow ended up offending EVERYONE.
Another individual that got a lot of heat for this ad was Kendall Jenner for not identifying the inauthenticity of the campaign & running along with it. Many argue that she was wrongfully caught in the fire but between building a successful career out of reality TV and walking the runaway, Jenner had then become quite a brand in herself. We know for a fact that she directly makes money off these promotions. Why then, must she not be questioned on the ethics of the campaign that pays her insane money?
Influencers, on the basis of their hard-earned following, have been able to derive huge benefits — no questions asked. But during these past couple of years, we witnessed a change in the mindset of the audience as it evolved on these platforms along with the influencer. The consumer, unlike how she used to be, doesn’t consume content without questions anymore, or rather, talks back now. The ability of an influencer to influence comes from her audience paying attention to her to the tee. If perceived positively, this rewards her. It also means that all the gory details of the influencer’s activities are analyzed under a microscope, and again, why not!
Take the example of Siddharth Batra & Komal Pandey’s feature as pioneers of ‘gender bending fashion’ in Vice India during the Pride month. Where Pandey has been occasionally seen in a power suit, Batra is sometimes spotted in Harry Style-inspired skirts. Now, we get it. The couple’s mass following combined with the once-scandalous gender-fluid fashion could be a step towards making it more acceptable in the society. However in doing so, Batra & Pandey ended up taking the space that should’ve been given to influencers from the trans community in India, the drag queens & Neel Ranaut, the individual on whom the feature was supposedly based on. The main problem wasn’t The Vice’s article claiming how Batra & Pandey have taken on centuries of gender norms (well, maybe that is a problem but more on that later), but how this was released during the Pride month when the entire LGBTQA+ community was to be celebrated instead.
Another such incident that happened more recently was when Dil Bechara Actress Sanjana Sanghi collaborated with Humans of Bombay in a post where she talked about getting her domestic workers vaccinated. Diet Sabya called her out on getting a feature on the platform for doing something as basic as getting her domestic workers vaccinated, and that too most probably for her own safety. Where across the country during the Pandemic, people are being given extra leaves, health insurance and other benefits, getting your employee who works in your house 24x7 a free vaccine shot from the government should be a given. Not something that you should expect a pat on your back for.
The audience was also painfully aware of how Sanghi, who was getting paid for her feature, used her domestic workers as props for goodwill when they weren’t obviously getting paid for it. Activists pointed out that usually these stories are made public after consent from the individual whose story is being shared, however in this case, there was no way both domestic workers would have approved of a post that put them in a somewhat negative light. By calling them selfless caretakers, and not domestic workers, the post had unintentionally implied they worked for Sanghi out of their good heart and weren’t getting paid for their hard work.
Let me further explain this-
Language is a powerful tool. Terms like maid, house help are markers of inequality that still exists in society today. By using words like workers for these hardest working members of our society, we help asserting their dignity and treat them with more respect. What Sanghi did was, in a way, an eye opener for many in the society.
But the question remains — how can you tell if your campaign is going to be tone-deaf? The simplest way of figuring that out is by asking yourself these questions before taking any such initiative:
- Do you genuinely care about this cause?
- Does it align with your values?
- Have you been living these values for it to justify you/your brand being a ‘representative’ for said cause?
- Are you willing to get called out on it if your actions don’t align with your campaign cause?
If your answer is yes to all these questions, by all means, go for it! If not, I’d suggest you to drop the idea and begin to build your company/personal brand on values that drive you. It’s best not to dig yourself into a hole you can’t get out of. If you still have-to-have-to do a CSR activity, hire a digital marketing expert or agency that’ll help you with a better campaign. You may have learnt what makes your audience tick but there’s a lot of sensitivity that goes into marketing, and cause marketing is a way more slippery slope. Engage yourself in genuine marketing, show the audience your real side and most importantly, trust your instinct. If an idea seems shoddy at first, that’s because it probably is.
