Please talk, but say nothing. A qualitative study examining the perception of brand activism in a woke-washing context

Sammanfattning: Today everyone is a politician. We communicate our thoughts, ideas and values with each other at an exorbitant rate and magnitude through social media. Following this wave of social awareness, it has become more important that the brands we shop at support our values and beliefs. However oftentimes when they do, the brands are met by accusations of using social movements to push an ulterior agenda. This leads to questions as to how brand activism is perceived, why it is perceived that way and where these allegations of being so called 'woke-washers' stems from. As the concept of brand activism is newly emerged, previous literature does not manage to convey an answer to these questions in a real-life setting. Therefore, we contribute to literature by deriving trends and implications of brand activism in a non-controlled setting. Through an observational study consisting of both a survey and extensive content analysis on 15 Instagram posts, we found that there really is no blueprint on how to be an activist. Our results primarily showed that although people are more or less favourable to a company taking a political stance based on their brand history and personality, people's reactions on social media does not always reflect this. To some extent, companies are always facing woke-washing accusations, but these can be mediated through how intelligently they convey their standpoint and the perceived genuity of their actions.