How Marketing's 'Woke' Rebrand Fueled Far-Right Movements

The Necessary Role of Marketing

Nobody likes to admit we need marketing, but the discipline has always been essential to match people with the products and services that fulfill their needs and desires.

Evolution of Marketing Strategies

It started simply enough, focusing on brands’ features and tangible benefits. As consumer society evolved, we transitioned to symbolic benefits: identities and lifestyles. Eventually, we began selling values—an ideology that peaked between 2015 and 2022 in the era of “brand purpose.”

The Shift in Brand Identity

During this time, brands transitioned from seeking love to demanding support, positioning themselves as movements rather than commercial entities. Do you stand with Nike against racial injustice? Do you support Hellmann’s in the fight against food waste?

By framing purchasing decisions as moral declarations, we suggested that self-correction could be achieved through consumption, with brands acting as profitable agents of social reform.

The Backlash Against Progress

Yet, a decade later, we find ourselves closer to the fascist ideologies we believed we had defeated. Brands are now scaling back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) commitments, or abandoning them altogether.

Complicity and Contradiction

It’s easy to blame figures like Trump or the so-called broligarchy, but we must examine the conditions that created them and our own complicity within the professional class. The contradictions of the brand purpose era are stark, as social progress once accompanied economic progress, now it's offered as a substitute.

The Exploitation of 'Woke' Narratives

This contradiction has been effectively exploited by the far right, which claims that leftist thinking infiltrated corporations, allowing them to position themselves as counter-cultural. This bizarre inversion has led many young people to support authoritarian or ethno-nationalist movements.

The Dangers of Commodifying Activism

Initially, the brand purpose era aimed to reconcile marketers' roles with positive change, but it became a cautionary tale of capitalism's ability to absorb critiques and repackage them. The backlash was inevitable: if progressive values could be commodified for profit, why not treat them as whims?

The Path Forward

As marketers, we must confront how we’ve trivialized activism by turning it into a communications strategy and co-opting movements only to abandon them when convenient. True structural reform cannot be achieved through consumption choices, and we must be prepared to get our hands dirty.

A Glimmer of Hope

Despite the grim outlook, there is a reason for optimism. We may have entered a “dark mode shift,” where true intentions come to light, allowing brands to return to their role of creating fiction and spectacle to facilitate consumption. However, we must recognize where meaningful progress stems from: grassroots movements, political organizing, and policy reform.

If we’re not willing to sacrifice profit for these causes, our most radical act might be one of humility, wielding our influence with greater care and consciousness than before. Here’s to proclaiming: the revolution will not go better with Pepsi.