There might be a better title but it’ll do.

Corporations insincerely adopt progressive themes because, at least in most Western countries, it’s become increasingly accepted, popular and seen as ethical in the dominant culture, and therefore is a good marketing strategy for reputation management.

This phenomenon is widespread, but some core examples are pink/rainbow capitalism, greenwashing, and spin (e.g. presenting exploitation such as outsourcing labor to cheaper markets as “diversity”, as opposed to actual diversity programs). A classic example of this insincerity is various companies (Bethesda, BMW, Cisco, General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Pfizer, Vogue and many more) famously adopting social media rainbow Pride logos only in some regions but not others - improving conditions for SGM is evidently not a true company value, it’s marketing.

I assume that before the normalization of progressive values in these markets, the same type of phony value signaling existed to exploit the dominant values of the time. For example, in the US, patriotism and Christianity.

I believe this is an useful topic to explore, because it can give us tools to explain to some of the more casual ‘anti-woke’ crowd the difference between progressivism and insincere corporate pandering, perhaps by comparing it with examples of corporate pandering abusing their values, perhaps the notorious commercialization of Christmas and Easter holidays for an example.

  • CrocodilloBombardino@piefed.socialEnglish
    91·
    9 hours ago

    I am generally skeptical of anyone who considers themself “anti-woke” or who complains about “wokeness” as wanting to have a sincere conversation about these things. I imagine in 99% of cases, it’ll be more likely that they complain about corporate wokeness because they simply don’t want to see representations of happy, successful lgbtqia+ people and people of color in mainstream culture, even if it’s just marketing. Maybe test the waters by making a similar point about the companies that market themselves based on pandering to the right and see how enthusiastically they agree about how bad corporate cooptation of culture is. At least then, you can say “and the same goes for corporations pandering to the left!”

    Still, the fact that seeing a bunch of rainbow logos actually bothers these people for reasons other than being sick of capitalist cooptation of liberatory movements would not give me much hope that that line of argument will be meaningful to them.

    • Nikls94@lemmy.world
      31·
      8 hours ago

      I‘m one of those who hate companies for changing their logo to rainbow and being all-inclusive for that one month. The rest of the year they’re just inclusive enough to not receive a shitstorm. It’s just marketing. I once read something like “Look! We made our logo rainbow! Now give us your gay money!”

      I’m happy enough to live in a country where a gay couple has the same rights as a hetero one. It’s even legally allowed for a lesbian couple to get an (I don’t know the English words for that) artificial insemation. Gay couples are allowed to have and adopt children. Even the heritage is the same as for hetero couples.