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Introduction
Reflecting on the idea of “marketing the brave” raises questions concerning the construction of brand narratives (Preece and Kerrigan, 2015), the characterising of bravery and who is ascribed this trait. A key site of connected exploration is the nexus of consumer culture, inequalities and resistance strategies, including media representations and celebrity images which depict knotted racial and gender issues (Bobo, 2001; hooks, 1992; Jackson, 2014; Jerald et al., 2017; Joseph, 2018; Sobande et al., 2019a). Related studies analyse topics associated with gender, feminism, marketing (Bettany and Woodruffe-Burton, 2008; Catterall et al., 2000; Maclaran, 2015; Otnes and Zayer, 2012) and commodity activism (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012). Although such research is expanding, there has been comparatively less consideration of matters to do with race, racism and the marketplace (Davis, 2018; Ekpo, 2018; Grier et al., 2019; Henderson et al., 2016; Johnson et al., 2019; Tadajewski, 2012).
There is a dearth of marketing scholarship at the crossroads of gender (sexism) and race (racism) studies (Gopaldas and DeRoy, 2015; Nölke, 2018), particularly with a focus on marketed depictions of Black people (Crockett, 2008). The work of Chakravartty et al. (2018, p. 255) emphasises that “communication scholarship at large needs to pay more attention to the persistent marginalisation of racial and ethnic minorities in today’s complex media systems”. This paper is aligned with such a position and examines how commercialised notions of Black social justice activism and intersectional understandings of oppression, feminism and equality are drawn on as part of current marketing efforts. It unpacks how brands make use of such issues in the content of marketing that predominantly upholds the neoliberal idea that achievement, social change and overcoming inequality requires individual ambition and consumption, rather than structural shifts and resistance.
Based on critical discursive analysis of ten marketing examples produced by global brands (Gatorade, H&M, Nike, Pepsi, Ram Trucks, Smirnoff), this work scrutinises who and what is framed as brave in marketing tied to interdependent issues pertaining to race and gender. Such analysis is guided by studies of media texts, represented subject positions and encoded meanings (Borgerson and Schroeder, 2002; Crockett, 2008; Hall, 1993, 2003). It is also stimulated by the need for more studies of feminisms that have rarely been the...