Lest we forget the “Live. Laugh. Lesbian.” shirt from Target.
A Brand’s Gotta Stand For Something, Right?
Today we are talking about Katie Martell’s talk about progressiveness and brands!
If you would like to be apart of the St. Louis chapter of the AMA please check out: https://amasaintlouis.org/
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SOURCES:
Please view this public video from Katie Martell where she gives a similar talk: https://vimeo.com/1068308524
Katie’s website: https://www.katie-martell.com/
Keisha Mabry Haymore – https://keishamabry.com/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233338520_Commodity_Feminism
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/24/business-food/walmart-juneteenth-ice-cream
https://corporate.walmart.com/content/dam/corporate/documents/purpose/culture-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-report/2024-annual-belonging-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-annual-report.pdf
Dubious lists of Corporate Social Responsibility:
https://rankings.newsweek.com/americas-most-responsible-companies-2026
https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/corporate-social-responsibility/10-companies-leading-the-way-in-corporate-citizenship
https://www.forbes.com/lists/best-brands-social-impact/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Earlier this month, we attended the annual conference for the American Marketing Association St. Louis at Webster University. It was an amazing well-run conference with some great speakers – and today, I’m going to share some of the key takeaways from a presentation by Katie Martell of Rabble Rouser as well as my thoughts!
So, there’s this playbook in the corporate world of grabbing ahold of social movements that are enjoying their moment in the sun and trying to piggyback off of them to sell more products. We’ve all seen it, from products that are sold in pink variants to raise awareness of breast cancer research to products that have civil rights icons on their labels to draw awareness to the historical struggles of women and people of color and immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community to be granted their deserved rights and privileges in society and of course the rainbow branding on every sort of product to show affinity for Pride month. And there are also products that tout environmental values, which claim to benefit poorer communities in some way or which donate some of their proceeds to designated charities.
And it feels good, doesn’t it, to consume things with all the convenience of a modern shopping experience but still feel like you’re making a difference somehow?
But I hate to be the bearer of bad news – most of these promotional campaigns aren’t in good faith and often mask some pretty cynical behavior behind the scenes, and over the last decade, many people have gone from believing that perhaps corporations espousing values finally mean what they’re saying to the more pragmatic view that perhaps corporations are just trying to catch a little bit of the energy from whichever way the winds are blowing.
This was the topic our keynote speaker brought to close out our annual conference for the St. Louis chapter of the American Marketing Association. Katie Martell is from Rabble Rouser and gave a talk titled “Woke Brands and Weary Consumers”. And I want to be respectful of Katie because unlike all of our other presenters at this conference, she is a professional speaker – and also an auctioneer! – and thus her content is part of what you get when you hire her, so I’m going to stay fairly general and only briefly recap what she had to say and then provide some thoughts on it.
But if you’d like to hear from Katie Martell directly, check the show notes – I’ve linked one of her publicly accessible talks from Boston in 2024 where she covers some of the same content. And if you like what she has to say, I encourage you to hire her.
I also want to mention that we had a great emcee the entire day named Keisha Mabry Haymore who is also an excellent speaker and is likewise deserving of your consideration if you need a speaker or emcee for your event. I’ve included details for both Katie and Keisha in the show notes!
But let’s dig into this keynote, which was definitely a thought-provoking way to end a marketing conference… and an important one, too!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Katie Martell opened her talk by being honest that she has seen her opinion change over the last decade from “corporations taking a stand is good!” to “corporations taking a stand is often problematic.” Her thought process evolved as she looked at the 2010s trend of Femvertising, which was itself not a new idea – as she pointed out in her talk, hearkens all the way back to cigarette advertising where an attempt to attach a brand to women’s rights activism resulted in the 1960s and 70s Virginia Slims slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby!” as the Philip Morris company rebranded their cigarettes to make them appeal to women.
That campaign, by the way, is absolutely revolting to look at today because so many of the ads are about how women were afraid to be seen smoking and now they’re boldly empowered to do so because they have elegant slim filtered cigarettes at their disposal. And Katie also reminded us that a couple of decades earlier, Marlboro, which was originally targeted towards women for pretty much the same reasons, went all-in on rugged frontier imagery and left women behind. The history of tobacco advertising is fraught with stuff like this; I’m so glad we as a society have moved past it.
Anyhow! Katie went on to talk about greenwashing, which is when corporations use claims of environmental friendliness to mask the horrible pollution they’re responsible for, and she also brought up the fact that the reason we use the phrase “carbon footprint” today is because the energy company BP grabbed onto the idea and used it to shift blame for air pollution from industry and onto the consumers themselves.
Greenwashing is often utilized in public campaigns to make large conglomerates look like they’re part of the solution instead of part of the problem, and Katie didn’t mention this, but it’s also used to mask cuts to service in some industries – in the hospitality industry, for example, hotels can pay fewer custodial staff by making daily cleaning optional for guests staying two days or more and can also reduce their laundering costs by washing towels and sheets less often and ditching pre-packed soaps and lotions for refillable dispensers. Are these cuts problematic? Not really. But they’re almost always masked by a lofty commitment to the environment proudly printed on cards placed in each hotel room.
Another common attachment over the last several years as been the LGBTQ+ community, and we’ve really come full-circle from corporations being afraid to touch this issue to many retailers and corporations putting rainbows on everything during the Biden administration during what felt like a shift towards progressive values in America to once again being afraid to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community once Donald Trump returned to office and more conservative politics became the rule of the day again.
And look – I don’t want to get any more political than we have to here, because this show’s about marketing, not politics, but if your corporate stance is to only lean in whichever way the political winds are blowing, you’re standing for yourself, not the causes you purport to support. To younger consumers in the Millennial and Gen Z population, that’s generally a big turn-off, because they value authenticity over hollow words. But it’s also a great way to court controversy because the moment you even slightly are forced to defend why you’re leaning in a certain direction, you tend to backpedal.
And, as Katie discussed, that’s exactly what happened to Bud Light when they created a commemorative can featuring a trans TikTok influencer named Dylan Mulvaney as part of a social media campaign that was not intended to create any sort of controversy.
Unfortunately, it did, and conservative media and personalities latched on the campaign and used it to stir up a lot of discussion. The right-leaning musician Kid Rock filmed himself using an MP5 submachine gun to shoot a case of Bud Light and posted it on social media. Even worse, Bud Light refused to take a stand of any sort, issuing an empty statement claiming they were just trying to unite America, not divide it. A boycott ensued, stock prices went down and Bud Light had to backpedal, losing credibility with everyone rather than appeasing anyone.
Likewise, Katie mentioned Target, who went from being a progressive Minnesota-headquartered company that celebrated diversity, DEI and the LGBTQ+ community to one that erased its DEI program, stopped featuring Pride month apparel in its stores and then refused to cede any ground when a boycott led by the black community took traction. Target has paid a huge price in lost customers and a tarnished brand as a result of it.
Katie pointed out that the evidence that a company doesn’t really stand for the values it espouses is in the makeup of the management; very few corporations have enough women, people of color, or LGBTQ+ personnel in upper management anywhere near proportional to the population, and diversity tends to be a term that’s more about celebrating the lowest-paid employees on the front lines, not the more highly paid corporate management staff, who are often male and often white.
Likewise, she said, efforts to ensure black-owned businesses own a proportionate share of retail shelf space – that’s 15%, by the way – have often fallen flat.
All of this, she concluded, gives us the illusion of progress, and the reality is that when these positions become unfavorable, you get situations like Walmart’s line of Juneteenth products, which the retailer released in 2022 and then received enormous backlash from on all sides of the issue.
One of the products that was particularly problematic was Great Value-branded ice cream flavor featuring red velvet and cheesecake flavors but which was a copycat of an ice cream flavor by the Black-owned business Creamalicious.
Rather than taking the feedback that they ought to be partnering with this business directly or pledging proceeds to support black-owned businesses in general, Walmart did what most companies do – it quickly pulled the product line, issued unsatisfying apologies and stopped celebrating Juneteenth, which is exactly the wrong way to approach a new holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States, particularly when the company has a front-line work force that’s only 48% Caucasian but so are 58% of the managers and 70% of the officers.
African-Americans, by contrast, make up 21% of the workforce, but only 12% of management and 10% of the officers at Walmart, and this is despite some very public attempts to improve on DEI in their corporation.
I enjoyed Katie’s talk quite a bit because I’m the sort of person who likes to make my outer persona match my inner intentions, and I think it’s important that we call out corporations that take advantage of many consumers’ desire to see a more equal, equitable and environmentally sustainable business community but then turn out to just be using those ideals as a veneer for bad behavior.
At the same time, it’s good that we support some of the companies who are doing legitimate good in the world. And we have to be careful, because a lot of the lists of these you’ll find on the internet include some companies who are doing exactly the sorts of things Katie called out in her talk.
Some of those featured on a Newsweek list of America’s most responsible companies or others I have linked in the show notes are notorious for treating employees, suppliers, customers and their own communities terribly. Many also sponsor harmful legislation and favor removing environmental protections. The methodology for all of these lists is flawed because it’s easy to make it look like you’re doing good in the world through corporate donations and CSR initiatives.
My rule of thumb – support small businesses whenever possible, support big box retailers who treat their employees well and support public benefit organizations and not-for-profits who are doing provable good in the world and who stand by their values even when it’s inconvenient.
Our sincere thanks to Katie Martell for being willing to speak up so boldly and passionately about what happens when brands pretend to stand for something but are potentially or actually doing more harm than good, and as a reminder to all of our friends in the marketing community – it’s always better to stand for something you truly care about than to make people feel like you’ve tricked them into feeling an affinity for your brand.
So if you want to support a public cause and don’t want to court controversy, pick something that everyone cares about, like making sure kids have school supplies or that communities have clean water or that food banks have donations flowing in or that military veterans have a support structure to help them transition back into the civilian world when they leave the service. These are all worthwhile causes that you can be 100% committed to and which definitely matter.
So next week, we’re going to be at the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference asking attendees to give us some fresh perspectives on what’s happening in the world of marketing, and we’re of course going to have some great marketing mentors back on the show very soon! It’s been a lot of fun to be able to keep bridging the gaps between our local marketers in this community, and as always, if you’re interested in being a guest, just let us know!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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