This essay presents my reflections on the subject of my Turkish-language book Marka Aktivizmi: Eleştirel Bir Bakış, published by Çizgi Kitabevi in 2023. Its title can be translated as “Brand Activism: A Critical Perspective.” The essay is adapted from my Turkish-language CultPost podcast episode, originally recorded to introduce the book. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument and examples.

Brands increasingly speak about more than the products they sell. They address gender equality, multiculturalism, inclusion, racial justice, environmental sustainability, and other social issues. Products are presented not only through their material functions but also as symbols of values, identities, and the possibility of change.

This development is generally described as brand activism: the use of campaigns, advertising, and public communication through which brands take positions on social, cultural, political, or environmental questions. Brand activism has become one of the most visible trends in contemporary marketing, but its roots extend much further into the history of advertising and public relations.

It is also a deeply contradictory phenomenon. Brands borrow the language and symbolic power of social movements, while social movements increasingly use the visual and communicative techniques of brands. Brands become activist, and activism becomes brand-like. My book examines this mutual relationship and asks what it means for advertising, consumption, and social change.

From Products to Symbols

One of the most famous early examples is Edward Bernays’s 1929 campaign for the American Tobacco Company. At the time, smoking in public was widely treated as acceptable for men but inappropriate for women. This social taboo limited the company’s potential market.

Bernays arranged for women to smoke during New York’s Easter Parade and presented their cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom.” The campaign connected smoking with women’s struggle against patriarchal restrictions. During the era of first-wave feminism, when women were fighting for political and civil rights, smoking could be represented as a rebellion against male authority.

The campaign showed that a product could be marketed through a wider cultural movement. A cigarette was no longer presented only as an object to consume; it became a symbol of emancipation, modernity, and equality with men. Consumers could identify with the meaning attached to the product as much as with the product itself.

This example also reveals the central ambiguity of brand activism. The campaign challenged a gendered prohibition, but it did so in order to sell cigarettes to a new group of consumers. An existing struggle for freedom was transformed into a marketing opportunity. From Bernays onward, public-relations specialists and advertisers increasingly emphasized the symbolic rather than merely practical functions of products.

Benetton and the Activist Brand

The association of brands with social change did not become a general advertising tendency until the late twentieth century. From the 1980s and especially the 1990s, public debate increasingly focused on racism, sexism, homophobia, multiculturalism, and environmental activism. Brands could no longer remain indifferent to issues that were becoming important to their audiences.

United Colors of Benetton became one of the most consistent and provocative examples. Working with photographer Oliviero Toscani, the company produced campaigns that combined photographic realism with symbolic images of social conflict. In many cases, the advertisements barely featured clothing. Social controversy itself became central to the brand’s identity.

In 1992, Benetton used a photograph of AIDS activist David Kirby surrounded by his grieving family near the end of his life. The image brought death and the human experience of AIDS into an advertising culture that normally avoided both. It helped create visibility for a crisis surrounded by prejudice, but it also raised ethical questions about using suffering and death to produce corporate value.

The 1990 image commonly known as “Blanket” showed two women of different racial backgrounds with a baby between them. It invited interpretations involving multiculturalism, nontraditional family life, and a lesbian relationship. In its 2011 UNHATE campaign, Benetton created digitally altered images of political and religious leaders kissing one another, including Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, and an imam with the pope.

Through such campaigns, Benetton established a recognizable activist brand identity. Consumers were invited to associate the company with multiculturalism, equality, tolerance, and provocative social criticism. Brand activism became more than an occasional campaign; it became a long-term positioning strategy.

The Mainstreaming of Brand Activism

From the 1990s onward, more brands began to identify particular sets of social issues with which they wanted to be associated. Feminist activism became increasingly visible, and brands such as Always, Dove, and Nike responded with campaigns challenging traditional gender roles. The development later described as femvertising became an important part of brand activism.

This does not mean that such campaigns are necessarily meaningless. Advertising can make previously excluded identities visible and bring social questions to large audiences. The growing presence of feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQ+, and multicultural messages demonstrates that social movements have changed what brands consider publicly acceptable and commercially relevant.

Yet brands usually enter these debates after activists have already made them visible. Social movements perform the difficult work of naming injustice and creating public pressure. Brands then translate aspects of these struggles into messages that can be attached to products and corporate identities. Activism gives the brand cultural relevance; the brand gives activism additional visibility.

The relationship therefore works in both directions. Social movements also use names, slogans, symbols, advertising techniques, and digital media to make themselves recognizable. Movements such as feminism and Black Lives Matter gain visibility partly by developing shared forms of communication. They are not commercial brands, but they use some of the same symbolic tools to organize attention and create collective identity.

Sustainability and Greenwashing

Environmental activism is another major field of brand communication. Since the 1990s, sustainability has become increasingly important in politics and public debate. Brands now promote reusable packaging, responsible production, renewable energy, and electric vehicles. Coffee chains encourage customers to use reusable cups, food companies emphasize sustainable sourcing, and automotive companies invest in technologies presented as environmentally responsible.

These initiatives may involve real changes, but environmental communication also creates the danger of greenwashing. Greenwashing occurs when a company uses images and claims of environmental responsibility to conceal, minimize, or distract attention from harmful practices.

Mercedes-Benz provides a useful example. The company has used nature-centered advertising while also facing serious criticism over emissions. In 2020, Daimler and Mercedes-Benz USA agreed to a settlement valued at approximately $1.5 billion following allegations of emissions cheating in diesel vehicles. Against this background, environmental brand communication can understandably be received with suspicion.

Social media has made such contradictions more visible. Consumers, journalists, and activists can compare corporate claims with environmental records and expose inconsistencies. Brand activism is therefore never controlled entirely by the brand. A campaign intended to demonstrate responsibility may also create an opportunity for public scrutiny.

This leads to one of the most important questions in brand activism: are companies acting because they genuinely want to help solve social and environmental problems, or because visible problems offer attractive marketing opportunities? The two motives may coexist, which is precisely why the phenomenon requires a critical perspective.

The Argument of the Book

My book develops this discussion in three main stages. The first section introduces the concepts of activism, branding, and advertising. The second examines critical approaches to brands through structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism, postmodernism, visual culture, and brand communities. The third focuses on social activism and the transformation of social movements across the twentieth century and into the present.

Throughout the book, I examine both sides of the relationship. Brands use activism to reach consumers and build symbolic identities. Activist movements use branding and advertising to create public space and increase their visibility. The relationship is mutual, but it is also shaped by unequal economic and communicative power.

The book was written in Turkish partly because I wanted these academic debates to reach readers beyond specialist English-language scholarship. Discussing it in a podcast served a similar purpose. Academic work often remains within journals, books, and professional communities, even though questions about advertising, social movements, sustainability, and corporate power concern a much wider public.

Brand activism should therefore be understood neither as evidence that corporations have become fully emancipatory actors nor as an empty gesture in every case. It can circulate progressive messages and contribute to public awareness. It can also appropriate social struggles, conceal contradictions, and turn political change into a consumer symbol.

The critical task is to examine both movements at once: how activism transforms brands, and how branding transforms activism.