Who Should Marketers Serve?
By Travis Knoll
Two active wars and social unrest at home have put the question of how active companies and their employees should be in social issues in stark relief. The executives that during the Trump years trumpeted corporate statements on political issues have turned cold on such employee “democracy.” Prominent investor Kevin O’Leary has also suggested that artificial intelligence makes students who protest or flag burn risk losing out on potential job applications and mortgage access “for the rest of your life.” In another segment, he questioned “who [CEOs] are serving” when they speak out on polarizing issues. Google, which supported Ukraine against Russia’s invasion in 2022, has now fired employees protesting its contract with Israel’s military, saying “we are a place of business.”
Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel’s Cultural Intelligence for Marketers (2024) directly tackles the question of who activist executives and employees should serve. Dr. Gabriel vigorously argues that marketers have two jobs, to transform society and protect the long term health of their brands. They can only do the latter through the former. Dr. Gabriel’s trajectory dovetails perfectly with these arguments. A first-generation immigrant from Latvia, she spent the 2010s in social activism before starting her own consultancy and eventually landing as a senior insights lead at Reddit (this author crossed paths with her at Duke University when she co-led a 2016 sit-in that shut down the campus’s main administrative building and during its first unionization efforts).
The book melds Dr. Gabriel’s past and present work. Her elegant introduction educated this historian of affirmative action, thankfully reading more like a civil rights history of advertising than a simple marketing literature review. She details the prevailing mood of marketers in the 1960s, positions that put them at odds with a changing culture that demanded a fairer representation of women and Black people in the midst of civil and women’s rights struggles. There were notable exceptions, such as DDB. By and large, marketers, using the argument that brands should stick to selling their products, failed to anticipate critical social trends and continued to underrepresent and stereotype Black people in their advertisements.
Chapter 1 lays out the case for both the power and responsibility of brands in society. Marketing has enormous “power in culture and society.” Companies are “cultural agents (28)” and thus “every marketing strategy, every campaign, and every creative ad is an opportunity [original] to make a meaningful impact, not only on the business but on society at large (20-21).” Marketers must analyze their own campaigns’ impact on representation, ideology and power. How brands package, what messages brands send about prevailing cultural norms, is as important as what products brands market. Brands also respond to cultural shifts on issues like size, inclusivity or risk being left behind.
Chapter 2 introduces the reader to how brands engage in changing cultures through its rejection of extractive methods, genuine engagement with audiences, sensitivity in communication, and building equity and inclusion into all of its campaigns to fulfill its “obligation-to be a transformative cultural force (52-53).”. Brands especially practice the latter by taking stock of the messages the brand already sends in the world, how one’s brand is “recognizing and seizing” its “power to enact genuine social change” and matching actions with messaging. For Dr. Gabriel, implementing all of these strategies means a rejection of a singular search for truth and instead an embrace of multiple truths emerging from historically marginalized communities.
Chapter 3 builds upon the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall to define culture as an entire system of belief, practice, lived experience, and competition for meaning. Brands can positively influence culture by not only thinking about what to depict, but how to “represen[t] and reinforce” social progress instead of “societal prejudices, racist beliefs, and power imbalances (75).” Failure to represent properly not only makes a brand tone deaf about its past, but causes it to commit obvious blunders such as advertising hoodies reading “coolest monkey in the jungle” using a Black model. Avoiding such errors involves setting default analysis to the experience of marginalized communities instead of the cultural status quo and being willing to analyze consumer culture. Marketers should not take consumers’ words at face value. Instead, strategic marketers need to look at legacy cultural mores within a society or brand (“residual”), acknowledge what are the prevailing cultural markers today (“dominant”), and figure out which cultural trends are most popular among growing constituencies critical to the business’s future (‘emergent”).
Chapter 4 shifts from analysis to action. Not content with sensitive marketing, companies drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Hall should “destabilize accepted social narratives, codes and myths” to encourage questioning of “widely held beliefs (109).” Gillete’s 2019 Story of Samson commercial centering a Black transgender man serves as a reassuring example that as scary as the term “subversive storytelling” may sound to some, what cultural intelligence requires is already being done in the business world. The Advil Pain Equity Project provides a quieter but equally impactful path to amplifying the voices and issues of marginalized groups. Lastly, Dr. Gabrieladvises companies to be as concerned with how a message might be received as to the message they wish to send.
Chapter 5 summarizes the history of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and corporations’ misuse of “intersectional” in the past decade as a synonym for diversity. The chapter provides an accessible summary of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational article detailing holes in U.S. law that make recognizing gender and racial discrimination simultaneously more difficult. Though the term often elicits fear among political detractors, the chapter presents REI’s Trailmade Collection and Cooperative Action Fund as a straightforward example of intersectionality in practice. As in the chapter on communication, Dr. Gabriel advises businesses to constantly ask themselves how they address overlapping constituencies in their campaign to prevent future missteps, not to “prescriptively” consume the firm’s marketing strategy.
Chapter 6 covers the relationship between grassroots activism, community relations, and brand reputation. Consumers have become increasingly skeptical of corporate marketing and many brands have provided inadequate responses, substituting a change of word or phrase for sustained engagement. This chapter calls on brands to put direct community impact before discourse. The chapter points to Microsoft’s Dear Coretta collaboration to highlight how companies can gain community trust through low visibility and high impact community collaborations.
Chapter 7 runs readers through “brand audits” which take a sustained approach to engaging current social trends and constantly evaluating the brand’s present and past position within society. By engaging a brand’s legacy and current position, companies like Pinterest can take a ratchet approach to their inclusivity efforts. Companies must mitigate the risk of cultural misalignment and the reputational fallout from self-serving social campaigns. In these last two chapters, Dr. Gabriel converges even with those like Alison Taylor who might disagree on the extent that companies should engage social movements.
Chapter 8 calls on brands to define their roles in society. Will they lean into traditional, and possibly obsolete, values or will they command the future? The chapter combines Dr. Gabriel’s work on abolitionist “critical imagination” with Bill Sharpe’s Three-Horizons Framework to walk corporations through processes to grapple with various plausible futures. Those trained in using climate scenario analysis tools should find comparisons to these frameworks helpful in reining qualitative aspects of their models.
The conclusion restates key points of the previous chapters and the epilogue warns marketers again about the cyclical backlash that can accompany concrete action and encourages dedicated marketers to stay the course. Space has not allowed a blow-by-blow of the array of interviews she assembled from leaders in culturally fluent marketing, but I highly recommend buying the book for the interviews with Rachel Lowenstein, Reema Mitra, Ambika Pai, Coco Videla, Tameka Linnell, Vanessa Toro, and Lola Bakare
The book combines an impressive range of frameworks and does not bow to the assumption that polarization should trigger company flight from tough issues. Some executives who believe that their businesses should consider both social impacts on business and the business impact on society are spooked by the current political environment. For them, the book provides a strident business case to move forward.
