The article discusses the evolution of marketing from highlighting features of products to promoting values and ideologies in the era of brand purpose, which peaked between 2015 and 2022. It highlights a shift where brands demanded to be viewed as movements, urging moral support from consumers. However, a decade later, contradictions have emerged, with brands scaling back on their commitments to social issues. It argues that social progress is now offered as a substitute for economic progress, calling for an examination of the conditions leading to this situation and our complicity in it.
We began selling values: an ideology that hit its zenith between 2015 and 2022 in the era of brand purpose. It's here we started to lose the plot.
By making purchasing decisions moral declarations, we sold the idea that we could self-correct through consumption. And brands were our champions at the centre of it all.
It's easy to blame the Trumps, the Tates, the podcasters, the broligarchy. Less easy is to examine the conditions that created them.
The contradictions of the brand purpose era are most apparent when looked at from the view of the average person. Social progress once came hand-in-hand with economic progress.
Collection
[
|
...
]