How to Make Your Brand Accountable

This is an edited extract from Cultural Intelligence for Marketers.

In activist communities, where the now-popular term stems from, accountability is seen as a cornerstone of community building. That’s why it’s an important part of the conversation that the industry is having about the future of community building in marketing. When we translate the concept of accountability into the context of brands, it takes on an equally, if not more, profound significance.

What we colloquially term “calling out” is, from the consumer’s perspec­tive, a call for greater accountability. To be authentic and emotionally resonant in brand communications, marketers need to understand where their inclusivity-focused audiences are coming from.

For socially conscious consumers, brands are not faceless corporations that sell products and have no bearing on society and culture. A study from the Center for the Study of Capitalism actually found that 44 percent of adults aged 18 to 34 agree that the CEOs of big busi­nesses should be more involved in solving social problems. Increasingly, newer generations are more sensitive to the fact that brand-driven busi­nesses are corporate entities with identities, values and considerable societal influence not only within business but also in society. Here is the paradigm shift that brands need to make: for businesses that are looking to future-proof their success, accountability can no longer just be about meeting sales targets, achieving marketing KPIs or only being accountable to stakehold­ers. Brands are now also accountable to the people; not merely as consumers as units of economic transactions but as participants whose input and feed­back extends beyond the point of sale.

Understand where people are coming from

Inclusivity in marketing, without actual social, remains little more than tokenism, and token­ism is, by definition, not only detrimental but fundamentally exploitative. This is the first lesson for marketers of community building and brand accountability. Marketing strategies that use historically excluded commu­nities to appear progressive without ever directing material resources or institutional power to make a positive social impact are akin to optical illu­sions. But sooner or later, the illusion begins to fade. Eventually, audiences catch on.

The reality of tokenistic gestures and performative actions soon becomes evident. Modern-day consumers are hypersensitive and aware of the fact that brands are capital-driven corporate entities that seek to benefit when customers purchase and consume products and services. That’s why consum­ers engage in boycotts: they know their power as drivers of revenue and market share for brands. Marketers need to understand this to produce culturally savvy marketing that isn’t detached or insensitive. By this, I mean that if you want to understand today’s customers and fulfill their culture-driven expectations, you’ll need to understand how socially conscious consumers think.

Sure, you might opt to drop the term “consumer” from your vocabulary, but my suggestion is actually to embrace and interrogate it more deeply. Here’s a harsh truth: ordinary people are under no illusion that they are “in the community” with brands, even the ones they adore. More than that, consumers today know that they hold the economic power to either support and amplify your brand—or, if not boycott it, then at least seriously consider a competitor.

This isn’t a call for every marketing campaign to suddenly become a rallying cry for social justice. That’s not the point here, and this kind of strategy of community engagement would probably backfire anyway! What consciously minded marketers must grasp is that, as consumer attitudes increasingly shift toward inclusivity and heightened accountability, future marketing efforts will be assessed against these evolving expectations that people hold for brands.

Learning from the activist discourse

Besides all the data, I know this with a great degree of certainty because I spent over a decade of my career as an academic, being a part of socially conscious, grassroots activist communities. This experience significantly informed my consulting practice in marketing. What I know to be true is this: ordinary working people don’t think like marketers. If you want to build genuinely inclusive and responsible lines of communication with customers, take the time to understand how conscious customers think about consumption, brands and capitalist relations in today’s society.

As a young activist—many years before my career in marketing and a decade before brand accountability was even picked up by marketers in the mainstream—I myself actively criticized brands for hypocrisy, even occa­sionally calling on others to boycott brands. I am biased, of course, but socially conscious consumers aren’t entirely unreasonable. They get indig­nant and loud on social media when brands make inclusivity and equity-related mistakes not because consumers are unreasonable, mali­ciously petty or bought into so-called “cancel culture” as some critics believe. It’s because people see brands as corporate entities looking to benefit from consumers like them by incentivizing them to purchase and consume goods. Indignation from socially conscious consumers—which, as research shows, is an ever-growing segment of the population—stems from people’s hyper-awareness that they are consumers—and not just people—to brands. Before you change your language, first understand that unless brands do something differently, it’s not how ordinary people believe brands see them.

This explains widespread consumer skepticism. As more brands attempt to align with social issues or cultural causes, public trust remains elusive. In fact, the gap in consumer trust is only widening. Consider that in 2019, a Sprout Social survey of over 1,500 U.S. consumers found that more than half (53 percent) believed that brands only take a stand for public relations or marketing purposes. Fast forward to 2023; this number is now significantly higher. In July 2023, Adweek reported that a new survey found that 76 percent of adults in the United States now believe that “brands take a stand on social issues to help generate more sales”. Changing the terminology without addressing the roots of how brands show up in culture is like putting a new coat of paint on a crumbling house. It might make us look and feel better, but it doesn’t change the problem on our hands.

Don’t assume that simply by ceasing to refer to your customers as “consumers” and opting for the more empathetic term “people”, you’ll change how your marketing audiences perceive brands in the context of corporate greed and subsequent distrust. Rather than denying or side-stepping the realities of our market-driven world, lean into them. Face it head-on and see it from people’s perspective. At the end of the day, this is what it means to build community: learn to deeply understand the people your brands serve. It begins with self-awareness. Then, you can begin to build strategies that resonate rather than agitate and aggravate.