Brand Activism

This book critically examines how brands determine the visibility of social issues through their advertising practices, informing the ways we are persuaded to feel, think, and act as consumers and citizens.

Scalvini makes an important intervention in our understanding of the relationship between consumers and brands. Highlighting the complex interactions between brands, their attachments to social causes, and the expectations and responses of their consumers, he creates a crucial case for recognising brands as political actors in contemporary society. At the same time, he emphasises the vital role that ethics must then play in their actions, to avoid the selective attention and prioritisation of causes and groups that perpetuates existing hierarchies. Consumers play a vital role in holding brands to account, and the book also reminds us that in an age of empowered consumers, the market is not only a place of exchange, but also a space where demands for brand accountability can no longer be ignored.

- Lee Edwards, Professor, Strategic Communication and Public Engagement , London School of Economics

In the upside-down world of fake news and the appropriation of discourses of empowerment by those who oppress, it is more crucial than ever that critical media scholars pause to consider the power that branding has or claims to have. Can advertising be a politically moral practice, or incite ethical responses to injustice? This book offers a bold analysis of these questions, thereby significantly advancing theories of both branding and media ethics.

- Mehita Iqani, Author of African Luxury Branding and Garbage in Popular Culture

Can brands be activists? Marco Scalvini offers a deep and captivating dive in the equivocal field of (digital) brand activism working through a range of mildly to fiercely contentious case studies. In Brand Activism, Scalvini questions visibility and ethics in this field through the complex dynamics between strategies and negotiations, highlighting their ethical implications for the (under)representation of ‘the Other’ and the reinforcement of affective capitalism over transformative action. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, Scalvini’s book is a necessary read for researchers and practitioners of advertising and consumer culture.

- Eleftheria Lekakis, Senior Lecturer, Univerity of Sussex , author of Consumer Activism Promotional Culture and Resistance

Marco Scalvini is a Senior Lecturer in the Communications and Media Programme at the London College of Communication at the University of the Arts London, UK.