Performative Marketing: From Greenwashing to Wokewashing

Photo Credit: Archillect

Performative marketing is what it sounds like: it’s when brands “perform” the role of being sustainable and ethical without backing up their claims with concrete actions. It can take on many different forms, from greenwashing to wokewashing, savior storytelling and tokenization. But what all of these have in common is that they aren’t accurate representations of brands. Lauren, Catherine, and Danielle explain why we need authentic narratives and how we can get there in this week’s episode of Unspun.  

Are brands woke?

Until recently, greenwashing was the most well-known form of performative marketing. It’s when a brand markets a product as being more sustainable than it is – whether that’s giving a product sustainable attributes it doesn’t have, or exaggerating production practices to seem more environmentally friendly than they are. This concept is not new to the industry and there are many instances of brands engaging in this practice. 

In 2020, following the murders of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and too many other Black lives, brands began another marketing performance: wokewashing. From posting black squares on Blackout Tuesday to captions denouncing racism, violence, and discrimination, brands were attempting to show their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. What was often lacking was an evaluation of a brand’s own culture and relationship to Black folks, and addressing anti-black racism occurring within their own companies. Begging the question: do Black lives really matter to you?

Anthropologie, Reformation, and Adidas were a few of the brands publicly showing support for the movement while privately mistreating Black employees and customers. Former employees came forward calling out these brands, and in the case of Reformation, the company’s CEO resigned as a result. 

Performative marketing takes on many forms. All throughout the industry people of color are tokenized, from marketing campaigns featuring a single Black model to employee handbooks representing a perfectly multicultural staff while maintaining an all or mostly white leadership team. The sustainability space specifically is awash in savior storytelling, where brands present themselves as the savior of overexploited brown people in underdeveloped places, reinforcing racist tropes and unequal power dynamics.

At the end of the day, these are all just ways for brands to dictate how they are perceived. But they are just stories and not accurate representations of reality.  

No time for pointing fingers 

One of the reasons performative marketing occurs is that brands feel pressure from industry organizations and consumers to make much-needed changes. Consumers’ increased awareness around companies’ social and environmental impacts makes it practically impossible for brands to not respond in some way. However because some brands respond from a marketing perspective, their responses lack commitment to fundamental change.

And this isn’t to say marketing departments are solely to blame. There is pressure on marketers to both tell a story and sell a product. It gets even more difficult when marketers are limited in their access to decision-making power. Oftentimes, marketing decisions come from upper management, and marketers themselves do not have the authority to dictate their company’s story. It’s not productive to simply blame marketers for performative marketing. Instead, we must look collectively as an industry at the system that perpetuates performative marketing and address its root causes. 

Moving toward authentic narratives 

Industry organizations and consumers are more aware of the dysfunctions in the fashion industry and the shortcomings on the part of brands. They are empowered and willing to call brands out for their disingenuous marketing. Any hopes of surviving this reckoning require a shift away from performative marketing and curated (incomplete) storytelling, toward authentic narratives. 

Authentic narratives require brands to understand where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going. To tell authentic narratives, we have to interrogate who’s given the power to dictate how stories are told and evaluate which stakeholders we’re centering, not only in the stories we tell but also in the audience we tell those stories to. 

To learn more about the pitfalls of performative marketing and how to move away from them with authentic narrative building, tune in to the latest episode of Unspun.