Brands are not your friends
Queer Liberation Not Rainbow Capitalism
(This blogpost is a tweaked blog-friendly adaptation* of selected excerpts from a paper I wrote for a Queering Feminism course I credited during my Masters in Women’s Studies. I am publishing this in the public domain in an attempt to take academic conversations beyond academia in a free, accessible manner.
*This means all sections on academic theorising have been removed, citations have been replaced by hyperlinks, and videos and images have been embedded where applicable for better readability for those not used to reading academic material.)
Mapping Contemporary ‘Queer-Friendly’ Marketing Campaigns in India
On Sept 6, 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down Section 377, thus de-criminalizing same-sex relations in India (Navtej Johar v Union of India), many Indian corporate brands quickly put out marketing campaigns of ‘support’ to capitalize on the moment. They painted their logos in rainbow colors and modified their brand taglines in seemingly witty ways to ‘celebrate’ the verdict.
Some examples:
- Bata — “Shoes don’t discriminate”
- CEAT; “Enjoy the smooth ride ahead”
- Mad Over Donuts — “Not every kind of love is straight”
- Cafe Coffee Day — “A lot can happen over coffee for everyone”
- Shaadi.com — “And they* lived happily ever after… *they: used to refer to a person of unspecified gender”
- Durex — “Celebrate the freedom of love”
- Swiggy — “It’s not been a piece of cake. But we got there”
- HBO India — “We see you the way you see us. With love.”
- Ola — “Pride starts now”
- Titan Eye Plus — “India wears the rainbow with pride.”
Google India put out a ‘rainbow flag’ on its homepage which pops up a message saying ‘celebrating equals rights’ when the cursor is hovered over it. The Facebook India page also changed its display picture to a rainbow-hued icon.
This set of campaigns aren’t a new trend in India. Following the global shift in advertising towards socially relevant campaigning, Indian brands have been trying to support social messaging of ‘taboo’ causes for a while now.
In 2013, continuing with its “Move On” tagline, FastTrack came out with a TV ad campaign “Come out of the Closet,” featuring two women eyeing each other teasingly after literally coming out of a trembling pink closet in an attempt to show a lesbian relation on-screen.
In 2015, online fashion retail company, Myntra, created a digital ad campaign called “The Visit,” for one of its fashion lines, Anouk, featuring a lesbian couple anticipating a visit from their parents.
In 2016, eBay came out with a TV and digital campaign called “Things Don’t Judge” which shows a series of scenes from ‘modern’, ‘tolerant’ Indian life (which is entirely represented by the upper middle class life), including a scene where a man proposes to his same-sex partner.
These campaigns have all gone viral online and been hailed in the media for promoting ‘gay rights’ and LGBTQ visibility.
Love that Dares Not Forget its Brand Name
Does the onset of such advertising social justice campaigns signal a shift towards corporates becoming more socially conscious?
The target audience for these campaigns is the digitally-connected middle upper class consumer who is likely to buy a product from a more socially relevant, ‘progressive’ brand. Ad campaigns need to stay relatable to the brand’s target audience if they want to maintain their market share. Given the increasing presence of social media, widespread political dissatisfaction among youth, and the ‘mainstream’ activism of online users, advertisers have found that activism sells.
Corporates are competing with each other in social campaigns as long as consumers are aware about it, with no space for humility. For example, Dove increased its sales to $1.5 billion when it came out with its “#RealBeauty” campaign which supposedly shows ‘normal’ women as beautiful. However, Dove is owned by Unilever which also owns Axe. Television advertisements of Axe deodorants (marketed for men) routinely feature conventionally beautiful (thin, fair, hairless, photoshopped) women. Ironically, Axe also showed ‘support’ for the Section 377 judgment with its campaign that proclaimed — “People say opposites attract. We say attraction has no rules.” The same parent company (Unilever) is on one hand, asking women to accept their bodies as beautiful (through Dove products), and on the other hand telling men to accept only conventional beauty of women (through Axe products). All of these are also very hetero-normative and binary depictions of beauty, attraction, and bodies. When corporates are co-opting rainbow flags, they are not showing support for LGBTQ rights; they are merely capitalizing on a consumer identity that can be ‘bought’ and ‘sold’ in a marketplace.
There are better ways of showing solidarity for the cause of LGBTQ rights that don’t decenter queer persons in the process. Many of the corporates that come out with these campaigns have a troubling human rights record.
There isn’t public data available about into many of these aspects, but there are some important questions that I propose must be asked of corporates to unpack the extent of their support for LGBTQ rights —
How many of these companies have Internal Complaints Committees in accordance with The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013?
Where does the money from these campaigns go — does this advertising trickle down to fair living wages to all employees, do proceeds get donated to LGBTQ causes etc.?
How inclusive are their hiring practices for queer individuals?
Does the company make information about its workplace conditions public — do they hire underpaid, outsourced labor?
Is the company’s management actively homophobic or transphobic or do they politically support or fund organizations or politicians who are homophobic or transphobic?
In what tangible ways did the company support queer activism before it became an opportunity to capitalize upon?
In a talk, Rachana Mudraboyina, a transgender rights activist and founder of Transvision, recently said —
“Many of the same multinational companies who are now capitalising on the 377 judgement with rainbow colours had earlier denied even janitorial jobs to the trans community.”
Zomato, which was quick to come out with a rainbow-themed marketing campaign in support of the Sec. 377 judgment (“Let’s get one thing straight: Love is love”), has reportedly not conducted any workshops to sensitise employees on sexual harassment for at least a year.
L’Oréal, Myntra and other fashion labels and beauty brands also splashed rainbows on their logos after the judgment; L’Oréal changed its tag-line to “Because we’re ALL worth it” and Myntra publicized a campaign with the M of its logo in different combinations with an inverted M as a W to show male-male and female-female relations. However, these brands have historically created and promoted products and clothing that further cement the gender binary.
Flipkart ran a campaign saying “The only cancellation we looked forward to. Order #377”. Companies such as Flipkart and Myntra have had cases of delivery boys accused of sexual abuse, and have seen strikes of workers protesting their poor working conditions and low pays.
Uber didn’t just splash a rainbow across its logo but also across its route map on the app with the tagline “#MoveForward, ride with #Pride!’. At the same time, Uber has been accused for underpaying drivers and has had several high-profile sexual harassment allegations against its management and their irresponsibility in handling the same.
Activism Sells
When consumers buy products from these brands, do they think about the nuanced, complex social factors that contribute to the discrimination against queer communities in status quo? Are consumers going to give their time, money, and effort to social movements? Or are they just buying a sweater with a false, fleeting sense of purpose?
Pinkwashed marketing campaigns fuel people’s social conscience and let them feel good about their consumer choices without actually having to change anything about their lifestyles or sacrifice anything for the cause — it makes ‘activism’ convenient by lowering the standard for what constitutes activism in the first place. Stepping into an extremely convenient Starbucks for its ‘fair-trade’ products (while the company also allegedly supports the Israeli government which itself is a poster-boy for pinkwashing) isn’t the same as donating your time and money at a grassroots-level for a social cause.
This form of consumption-driven corporate activism dilutes the concept to a series of objects and experiences that you can buy without making any difference to the disempowering, discriminatory power structures that dictate the conditions of their access. Such ‘activism’ is also never defined by nor does it benefit the people who need it most; most of the overpriced products marketed by these campaigns are inaccessible to large sections of the population, especially marginalized populations of LGBTQ communities who are on the receiving end of multiple forms of overlapping exclusions in terms of their class, caste, gender locations etc.
It is thus necessary to further reflect upon the consumerization of queer identities and how corporate campaigns that posture solidarity for queer causes sideline real issues of corruption and human rights violations while invisibilizing the efforts that go into making social movements successful in the long term.
