The Growth of Activist Marketing

BRAND MANAGEMENT
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Brand Management
Corporations remain the biggest voices in people's lives bearing how they control what people consume. To mark their influence on consumers, the corporations must communicate with those consumers and ascertain the needs. While the need to increase sales increases, more corporations emerge, and competition increases. Such changes steer organizations into instilling new marketing strategies besides the traditional ones that focused on brands. Presently, brand activism has become a unique avenue for brands to interact with their consumers. The change has attracted debates as one faction sees it as a violation of the organizational mandate to maximize profitability, while others have seen it as an avenue to maximize loyalty. While the debates on brand activism continue, there have also been significant inputs on how organizations should steer re-imagined capitalism, something that would revitalize the entirety of marketing. This paper assesses brand activism in the wake of re-imagined capitalism. The analysis should help corporations to understand brand activism and re-imagined capitalism and its validity in marketing without compromising the primary ideal of businesses, which is to maximize shareholder revenue.
The proliferation of Activist Marketing
Activist marketing is becoming commonplace among corporations presently. Activist marketing or brand activism is not a new concept in the corporate world. It has become part of the consistently evolving cause of marketing and corporate social responsibility to a big extent. As far back as the 19th century, there were elements of activist marketing at the peak of industrialization, even though not as profound as they are presently (Shetty, Venkataramaiah, & Anand, 2019). As companies were industrializing, others joined in the fight for the welfare of workers. Later in 1953, Howard Bowen coined the term corporate social responsibility (CSR), which was cemented in place by the Committee for Economic Development in 1971 (Ebrahimi, Sadeghvaziri, & Abyaneh, 2020). In such concepts, it was established that corporations are obliged to contribute to the needs of society because they existed and functioned courtesy of the public. That marked the onset of extensive relationships between corporations and society's needs amidst popular claims that the only objective of business organizations was to create revenues.
Brand activism has attracted more debates bearing how it propels CSR concepts. In brand marketing, corporations are required to participate actively in societal causes. It has been defined as the corporate effort to use its brand to direct, impede, or promote sociopolitical, economic, and environmental reforms for the betterment of society (Ebrahimi, Sadeghvaziri, & Abyaneh, 2020). In organizations where marketing stems from brand activism, the content of such marketing is on the positions that brands take concerning occurrences in the community. Multiple cases can be cited to showcase the scope of brand marketing in contemporary business settings. In late May 2020, people across the world and the US specifically turned up in arms to protest the murder of George Floyd. Their motive was to rally ...