Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Illustration by Alexandra McDermott Brown
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is:
The Problem With Brand Activism
As for many, being trapped in the house during lockdown was emotionally taxing. Sure, not being able to see people for months really impacted my social skills and gifted me constant cabin fever induced headaches, but it reminded me of what I do best: consume vast amounts of food-related online content in the hopes of suppressing the faults of the world, one recipe at a time. With the aim of respiting my passion for cooking, I rediscovered one of my all-time favourite types of food content, which comes in the form of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen YouTube videos.
If you don’t know BA, let me clue you in. Bon Appétit began in 1956 as a food and entertaining subscription magazine based in New York City and owned by mass media company, Condé Nast, which boasts the influential publications The New Yorker, Allure, and Vogue, amongst others. The BA charm in 2020 is translated into their favoured YouTube channel which features different series, hosted by different cast members. The participation of celebrities and influencers, along with the diversity in the poster faces, made BA the “millennial kitchen,” legitimizing its presence in the food industry and attributing significant amounts of credibility to it, both from food experts and non. Therefore, saying I was disappointed to learn of the pressing inequalities that contaminate the company, many of which were blatant to the naked eye, does not cut it. It made me ask myself why I was so interested in BA, and why I completely overlooked the APPALLING red flags, ultimately encouraging me to focus on the broader concept of brand activism, in particular during the recent Black Lives Matter movement protests. So, let me unpack this for you.
Controversy arose when BA staff member, and guiding light to many, Sohla El-Waylly publicly exposed the pay inequality within Bon Appétit editors, suggesting how the company favours her white counterparts, allegedly paying fan-favourite Claire Saffitz $20,000-30,000 per video, whilst she rests on a $50,000 salary. The Instagram story posted by El-Waylly this past June responds to a resurfaced picture of BA editor-in-chief Adam Rappaport in brown face, which she states to be outraged by, and took as an opportunity to shine a light on the phony-natured diversification and tokenism of the company which is reflected in its internal policies and regulation. First of all, while all white editors have their own show, even those without the same level of qualifications as El-Waylly, no POCs have a series on the YouTube channel and, according to the editors, are not paid for their contribution to the videos.
Now, I’ve been watching BA for a while and I can tell you that Sohla Is truly everyone’s helping hand. She appears in most videos, often saving the day, or the recipe, like the superhero she is, and constantly shares her wisdom which is often reflected in her recipes. Her response served as a catalyst for her fellow non-white colleagues to reaffirm the same treatment and lack of compensation. Furthermore, fellow chef Hawa Hassan, the only black chef at BA (let that sink in), spoke out on the unfair treatment she endured after filming two videos for Black History Month (and this) and was paid a mere $400 for (and THIS).
To me, Bon Appètit served as a gateway into my focus on the perils and inconsistencies of brand activism, especially with regards to the recent Black Lives Matter Movement protests, which rebel against the systematic racism and oppression within our society. Given the importance of social media in our everyday, followers and likes are our new currency, and Instagram is the platform where performative representations of support are shared in the aim of appeasing the masses or finding some kind of ultimate spiritual absolution of sin. Brands nowadays have to take a stance because the consumerist market, mainly made up of Gen-Z and Millennials, cares about what they have to say. A company’s policy can make it or break it. We can see this with the widespread growth of cruelty free makeup industry which has seen a 175% sale boom since 2013. That’s because our personal principles are what we look for in a brand and we have learned how to detect real from fake activism and, let me tell you, it’s not that hard. A brand taking a stance can sometimes be done “right” or can come across as completely tone death, but ultimately, there is little difference between the two if a company’s internal policies straight up contradict the heart wrenching message they want to convey on their aesthetically pleasing Instagram infographic, or on their multimillion-dollar, Kardashian-infused TV commercial. So, is it really much more than a marketing plan? Well, no – if what is on the surface does not reflect what’s underneath.
As imagined, another huge culprit lies within the fashion industry. Let’s think about how high-end, sustainable clothing brand Reformation came under fire days after stating their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. The minimal Instagram post, sharing a list of organisations to support the movement, backfired into a myriad of the company’s employees condemning racist treatment and depicting their experience at the company as traumatizing and fearful for people of colour. In particular, then CEO Yael Aflalo was victim of backlash from her former employees, which accuse her of racial discrimination and for the perpetration of an environment which blatantly favoured white workers through substantial pay disparities and inequality in advancements. Ok, what now? Well outrage erupted for a couple of weeks, hashtags were created, and donations were made and, yeah, that’s amazing but it just shows you how performative activism can be. So, is it really much more than a marketing plan? Well, no. If what is on the surface does not reflect what’s underneath.
This begs the question: how do you know when a company is being fake and just pandering? Of course, there is a difference between brands that are now choosing to adopt the performative action of posting a trendy Instagram post, those who contribute to the morbid mosaic of the black squares instead of effectively providing any resources, to companies that have always supported the movement, even when it was not as convenient for them. Let’s think of Nike for example. Nike chose to publicly support NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2018 after he took a knee two years prior in protest of the unjust treatment of African Americans in the USA during the Trump Administration. That, as you will remember, led to chaos within trainer enthusiasts. There was a strong dichotomy between those who chose to keep buying more shoes in support of the brand, – thus Kaepernick, thus the movement – and those who decided to #JustBurnIt. The former clearly won because Nike sales surged by 31% in just a matter of days and, to this day, they keep donating to the movement and have amounted more than £30m in 2020. So that’s amazing, right? Finally, a huge multinational standing up for the good. Well… don’t count your chickens before they hatch. As of last month, various employees are stepping up with allegations of racist micro-aggressions and unbalanced power dynamics between white employees and employees of colour. I’m not saying Nike doesn’t believe in Kaepernick and what he was protesting against when he kneeled during the anthem in 2016, but putting wool or, in this case, catchy slogans, won’t suffice in the long run.
Will a slew of CEOs resigning make a difference? Maybe. But is it more than just performance art? That’s up to us. COVID-19, and the global economic hardship it bought with it, gave us an outlet. We, as consumers, have more power now than we have ever had. The future of a company is truly in our hands as we can actively choose who to support and who to boycott in the comfort of our own home. These issues aren’t new, but a light is being shed on them, one so bright that a performative black square on Instagram wont dim. It leaves me to wonder if these companies really do think Black lives matter or if, instead, they believe consumers who believe “Black lives matter” matter more. Well, I guess CWBBLMMM is not quite as catchy.
Maria Vittoria Manni is a third year student at the University of Edinburgh studying Social Anthropology.