Business has jumped on the BLM bandwagon, just as it jumped on the Covid-19 bandwagon. From Daniel Payne at justthenews.com:
As protests and demonstrations against racism and police brutality drag on for another week across America, numerous corporations are scrambling to capitalize on the moment by donating to various Black Lives Matter organizations and allied causes, winning praise and sometimes sharp criticism for P.R. efforts that are by turns successfully deft and sometimes unfortunately clumsy.
The practice of corporate-sponsored social justice messaging is not new. The modern tactic of fusing activism with capitalist enterprise was perhaps embodied most famously in 1971’s “Buy the World a Coke” advertisement, which utilized the contemporary hippy movement and the ongoing postwar counterculture to sell sodas.
Nearly 50 years later, Pepsi would famously try to pull off a similar campaign, depicting reality television star Kendall Jenner apparently solving the problem of police brutality with a can of Pepsi. Widespread backlash to that advertisement demonstrated the limits of corporate activism, which must balance the marketability of its product with the integrity of the movement it’s trying to co-opt.
