Morality, Branding, and the Marketplace: A Review of Big Brands Are Watching You by Francesca Sobande

Review: Sobande, Francesca. Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture

Dr. Francesca Sobande is a lecturer at the University of Cardiff in Wales. Her research interests span Black feminism, diaspora(s), archives, and pop culture; politics of media and marketplace; digital remix culture, music, and the internet; and cultural memory. Before becoming a university lecturer, Dr. Sobande worked in different communications roles in higher education, the arts, and the non-profit sector. She is the author of influential works such as Consuming Crisis: Commodifying Care and COVID-19 published by SAGE in 2022, and The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. She also co-authored Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland with layla-roxane hill published by Bloomsbury in 2022 (readers may visit the author’s website to access a full list of her publications).

Big Brands Are Watching You is situated within the fields of Black media philosophy and Black digital studies, employing a critical perspective on race in the marketplace. Dr. Sobande’s book touches on different concepts, specific examples, and collected quantitative data to offer the reader an informed analysis of how big brands and the highly interconnected and mediatized world affect consumers’ decisions. From the concept of morality to activism, marketing, influencer culture, and the use of nostalgia, Big Brands Are Watching You provides an insightful account on how, as Dr. Sobande puts it, “Big Brands are (and will keep) watching you (watching them)” (xi). Consequently, the book asks: Who holds the power? Are we really choosing freely?

Francesca Sobande refers to the purpose of her book as an “attempt to bridge gaps between critical studies of branding, consumer culture, digital media, sociology, and the marketization and monetization of morality and social (in)justice” (34). An ambitious objective, but one that the author successfully accomplishes by morality, activism, marketing, influencer culture, and nostalgia through compelling examples and experiences relatable to a wider variety of readers. As a starting point, she deals with data mainly from the United States and United Kingdom, and though she also includes the former Tony’s Chocolonely Superstore and Chocolate Bar in Amsterdam, these two research sites provide plenty data for an analysis of two of the most established marketing hubs.

Dr. Sobande’s book deals with different questions, themes, and topics, but “what ties them together is how they demonstrate some of the many ways that morality is (re)defined and negotiated in the marketplace, and how they illustrate various shaky bridges and boundaries between brands, activism, digital culture, and pop culture” (204). The concept of morality is not static. It changes through time and cultures and consumers hold different definitions of the term. Dr. Sobande shows how the (re)definition and negotiation of morality influence consumers’ decisions, and their support for specific brands, events, products, and lifestyles. She demonstrates how brands position themselves depending on what their customers may like, intentionally relating capitalism to liberation. However, through various examples and data analysis, the author effectively proves that this behavior is a planned illusion of brand activism inserted into our present consumer culture.

To support her arguments Dr. Sobande analyzes different data collected through a bricolage methodology. She describes this methodology “in terms of both using a diverse range of research methods and analyzing a diverse range of marketing material, artifacts, and representations” (21). The author carries out an in-depth analysis of survey responses, archival material, interviews, and pop culture content, such as tv shows and her own experience at the “When We Were Young” music festival in Las Vegas. More specifically, she analyzes four hundred responses to a survey focused on the perception of concepts such as ‘woke-washing’ and the relationship between consumer culture and activism. For the archival material, she visits the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution Archives. She also interviews six experts on media, marketing, and retail; and she refers to concrete examples of brands and tv shows such as Ben & Jerry’s, BrewDog, Levi’s, Lush, Tony’s Chocolonely, and Industry, Partner Track, Severance, Succession, You, and The Bold Type.

All these examples add credibility to her arguments and guide the reader through her in-depth research on digital remix culture to analyze how morality is used by brands as a scapegoat to impact consumers’ decisions. Throughout her book, Dr. Sobande creates pertinent connections across the different material, providing examples and allowing sufficient discussion space to question these brands’ decisions and behaviors in the past years. As a result, she presents plenty of evidence to demonstrate how brands decide who to support and what causes to favor based on structural whiteness both in the United States and United Kingdom. Although the book is well organized and the argument is easy to follow due to her writing style, readers may feel lost if they do not know the brands and/or the tv shows the author refers to. Ultimately, some background knowledge is needed to fully grasp the author’s aim.

The book consists of four chapters and a short preface. In Chapter 1, Dr. Sobande sets the scene for her book. She presents the context and research while explaining her objectives and methodology. In Chapter 2, she navigates the politics of morality, and focuses on power struggles while using an intersectional analysis; for instance, she discusses the role of colonialism in forming capitalism. She points out the importance of this action since earlier research on similar topics does not refer to the association between colonial practices and economic structures. Chapter 3 discusses the relationship between influencer culture and social justice, revealing branding practices and activist approaches. Dr. Sobande questions the interactions of influencers and activism, expanding on the concept of ‘culture wars,’ by citing Stuart Hall and other influential scholars. Finally, in Chapter 4, she challenges the idea that brands can portray a coherent image between what they say they believe in and the corporate actions they make. In other words, they would rather sell diversity instead of really achieving it.

Following Dr. Sobande’s work, it would be interesting to see more research done around this topic, an analysis of different brands and other countries outside of the United States and United Kingdom, for example. As mentioned before, this study is written with a European and American audience in mind, and approaching its content without any knowledge of these contexts might be challenging. Readers may benefit from conducting a light search before engaging with the book; for instance, watching TV show trailers or learning major brand names. Otherwise, this book is a valuable educational tool to understand how brands use the (re)construction of morality in the marketplace to create a connection between activism and capitalism. Considering this is a fundamental issue globally due to the growth of social media and consumer markets, we must approach it from a critical transnational perspective.

References

Sobande, Francesca. Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture. University of California Press, 2024.