Risks of Cultural Marketing in the Era of "Cancel Culture"
Omar Birendra Ramto1*, Mehdi Farajallah2
1 School of Business and Management, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia
2 Marketing and Sales, ESC Rennes School of Business, Rennes, France
*Corresponding Author: [email protected] Accepted: 15 November 2022 | Published: 1 December 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.55057/ijaref.2022.4.4.8
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Abstract: The current research study is conducted to analyse how businesses partake in using culture in their marketing strategy, whilst risking the threat of the social media movement known as “cancel culture”. Conducted through descriptive analysis of qualitative secondary research methods, the data of different examples would help build analysis and comparison on the overall risks of cultural marketing and “cancel culture”. Comparisons of businesses such as Marvel, Riot, Pepsi, and Burger King show how to properly make use of culture to market a business and also how a business could make mistakes through using culture, which also eventually leads to facing the “cancel culture” movement. Concluding with the findings that the risk correlates with the appropriateness of how the culture is used in their marketing strategy, risks for businesses to avoid getting “cancelled” could be reduced when used with a great cultural understanding. Therefore, the risk of using culture and the risks from the threats of “cancel culture” depend on the cultural ignorance of the business and how they plan on using said culture.
Keywords: Cultural Marketing, Cancel Culture, Social Marketing
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1. Introduction
1.1 Background
Culture has always been the key factor in the identity of oneself. Therefore, culture has become an important part of relating to someone’s lifestyle scenarios. Due to this underlying idea, businesses have always used this knowledge to market their products to segmented audiences based on their cultural group. Thus, forming the term that is called cultural marketing.
The idea of cultural marketing is used as a strategy to attract consumers that are located within a different area. Marketing strategies are used toward their target market’s culture to attract and sustain their customer's attention and loyalty. This created the idea that a business that uses a certain culture in its marketing strategy could relate to and understand the life that its customers have lived. Therefore, creating this image of a safe space product in the eyes of their audience.
For years, this idea has become a widely accepted concept of marketing that has been used by local shops to multinational enterprises. Proving that understanding cultural representation is the key to winning a customer’s heart, be it nationally or internationally. As time goes on, however, people have started to change, they have become more protective and sensitive in discussing the topic of their identity, which includes culture. This goes on to the fact that slight mistakes in the way a culture is being portrayed could create a negative perspective on whoever
is portraying it. Thus, culture has now become a risky topic to discuss on any media, especially on social media where everyone could see it.
Businesses who have attempted cultural marketing in this era have to now understand the high risks that could affect them for even the smallest mistakes could lead to their demise. These mistakes could generate negative perspectives on said businesses and badly impact the product and image they are trying to market. In a sense, these mistakes could lead businesses to get somewhat boycotted.
The current term for this movement is known as “cancel culture”. “Cancel culture” has been able to nit-pick mistakes from marketing strategies that wrongfully portray a culture through online social media, and use those mistakes to ruin a business’s image. This turns “cancel culture” into one of the biggest threats that a business could receive to their image, and turned what was the most preferred marketing strategy full of opportunities into one of the riskiest strategies in marketing. Therefore, In the era of “cancel culture”, is cultural marketing a business's biggest risk.
1.2 Problem Statement
Along with the rise of “cancel culture”, the sensitivity of the public has led to the increase in risk for businesses to take on cultural marketing as a method of strategy. Therefore, the problem is whether businesses should still consider taking risks knowing fair well the very sensitive threat of the people on the internet.
1.3 Research Question
Should businesses take the risk of using cultural marketing in an era of “Cancel Culture”?
1.4 Research Objectives
• To identify the average appropriateness of cultural marketing done by different types of businesses
• To identify the utilisation and effects of a business from good and bad cultural marketing 2. Literature Review
2.1 Marketing
What is Marketing? At first thought, marketing could be defined as selling and advertising a product for a business. However, marketing is more than that. Marketing, as defined by the American Marketing Association, could be defined as follows: ‘Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.’ (AMA, 2017).
In general, marketing takes care of all sorts of communication that goes between the seller and their consumers (Burton, Deans, Brown, Armstrong, 2012).
In addition, there is another definition where it states that there are two sides to marketing, where one philosophically focuses on the goal of consumer satisfaction and the other focuses on the activities and process of the philosophy (Lamb, Hair, McDaniel, 2013). In this aspect, marketing is seen as more than just the activity performed between business and customer, but also emphasises the theory and attitude whilst doing said process.
Marketing is considered an important aspect of business as it is one of the 6 general functions within the areas of business, whilst the others are strategy, finance, human resources, technology and equipment, and operations (BDC, 2022). That being said, marketing is one of
the key factors of a business that revolves around its customers. Since businesses find their success through their customers and not their producers, this proves how important marketing is for the success of a business. Without marketing, businesses would not be able to generate any success no matter how high quality their products turn out to be.
Therefore, when it comes to finding success within marketing, the goal is to reach customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction could be defined as the evaluation from a customer of whether the goods or service presented is to customer expectations. Thus, reaching customer satisfaction not only helps in increasing brand image but also increases customer loyalty as well. This shows the importance of customers in the concept of marketing as they are one of the most important stakeholders for any business.
2.1.1 Social Marketing
One aspect of marketing is known as Social Marketing, which could be defined as the implementation of marketing activities using social purposes to persuade the behaviour of society (Kotler, Zaltman, 1971). Society usually favours buying from businesses that follow the ethical and social perspectives of the people. Therefore, businesses would attempt to use those perspectives in their marketing plan to grasp a hold of favouritism through public bias.
Since these businesses aim to please the community, it creates a form of trust between buyer and seller and forms what is known as customer loyalty. Thus, it shows the importance of social marketing as it aims to attract society’s bias towards their businesses and to help sustain the customers to stay loyal to them.
Although it aims for social interests, it is completely different from the common commercial marketing that the public is used to majorly see. Common commercial marketing is where marketing activities are done to influence the target audience with the prioritised intention of gaining profit. This type of marketing consists of persuading potential consumers to perceive their product to be the best choice. Therefore, it does not have any social intentions that are usually used by social marketing.
Considering why social marketing tends to be preferred for businesses is due to the advantage that social marketing could create more customer satisfaction, in the sense of trust and loyalty for the brand image. In a sense, it can be seen that commercial marketing prioritises customer satisfaction based on the product they are selling whereas social marketing prioritises the concept of influencing society for the better to gain customer satisfaction through trust and loyalty as the intentions are based on social problems.
2.1.2 Cultural Marketing
Formed from the shared environment of the people. culture can be defined as a term that identifies a particular group of people based on ideals, norms, ethnicity, and other characteristics within social communities (Lee, W.-N.,2019). Through culture, people have been able to live uniquely within one another and freely express their different identities with everyone else across the world. It is found differently among friends, colleagues, and even relationships no matter how similar they could be, as culture can be formed anywhere and by anyone. Culture shapes the behaviour of a person and embodies it to help form their evolving interests (Whiten, Hinde, Laland, Stringer, 2011). Therefore, culture has become an important aspect of the identity of a person and influences the way they perceive and interact with the world.
As culture can be seen as an important part of a person, it proves to show that discussing a person’s culture with the said person, per se a target audience, would create a positive interaction that could attract the target. Since culture has become a comfort zone for people, it can easily influence attraction toward whoever the audience is. Therefore, being self-aware of this knowledge has become an important advantage for people in attracting the attention of the public. A methodology that has been used by any identity to be attractive, would also include businesses.
In the business world, this method is termed cultural marketing. A method where marketing is portrayed using a certain aspect of a specific culture and using it to attract the segmented target of a culture. Cultural marketing could be defined as the promotion of culture toward the general public through a business (Pipoş, Funaru, 2013). Although it began from identities such as NGOs (Non-Government Organisations), religious organisations, and other non-profit organisations as part of social marketing, as time went on this type of marketing has evolved to be adapted by businesses for the purpose of a more commercial intention (Pirvu, Lazar, 2018).
By adding a commercial aspect to cultural marketing, Businesses are able to profit off social ideals that either have been going on for a long or have been trending at that time. Usually involving a culture of a society, using culture usually helps bring out a vast majority of attention from the targeted community. Thus, the attention persuades the audience to view whatever product the business is marketing to be seen as a want or need for that particular cultural community, as it would make them feel as if their culture was represented by the business. This in return creates cultural marketing, which started as social marketing, to have a certain commercial aspect to it.
Commonly used within International Marketing, cultural marketing is adapted between two different cultures to form cross-cultural marketing (Popovici, 2011). As it is commonly known, different areas (e.g. cities, states, countries) have different cultures, no matter how similar. This would include social norms, religion, traditions, and many more. What could be seen from this is that cross-cultural marketing is done where a certain culture is being marketed to another culture.
2.1.3 Social Media Marketing
Technology has developed in the past decades, one of the most impactful pieces was the internet, a globally designed network for computer-based systems that provides communication and information for all connected users. Through the global communication network that the internet has provided, the internet has evolved into a communication system that facilitates internet users to create their own internet personas or identity. This, around the 1990s, started the idea of social media (Cooper, 2022).
Social media is commonly referred to as an application that connects with the internet to create a social networking profile. An application that would start off from websites online such as Facebook and Myspace into applications that are developed in the form of software for mobile phones, examples consisting of Instagram and Snapchat. As social media has become a common idea as time passes on, the concept has become a certain norm or culture where almost everyone has a certain social media.
As the rise in the use of social media has turned into some sort of culture, people’s ideas and perspectives are highly influenced by what is seen on social media. This is due to social
influence, where a person’s thought process is affected due to the influence of the people around them (Coles, 2017). The social influence could only be processed in a social networking setting, which could be done within social media as it is simply an online social network setting.
This shows the power that social media has in creating attention and influence towards the public. Therefore, identities that have had success with their social media personas through creating a mass following on a platform could be referred to as social media influencers.
The influence on social media has in turn become a valuable advantage for identities. Catching the attention of organisations, entities such as businesses have all started to create their own social media identity to create the attention of a following. This could ensure another platform for promotion in comparison with the usual commercial method of promotion such as television ads, billboards, and posters. Through the additional benefits of having a social media identity, it also helps the business be able to communicate better with their followers/customers/potential customers since social media helps in the communication between two users. This helps in increasing customer loyalty as followers are able to feel heard by social media users.
However, the main objective of social media marketing is to use social media to promote their products to their followers to ensure influence and attract their products to the public. Since social media is a global networking platform, the range of viewership of the content posted is massive (Li, Larimo, Leonidou, 2021). The basics of marketing have basically been applied towards a more effective platform the more growth social media has on the influence on the public.
An example of social media marketing would consist of endorsements where they would use social media influencers would be paid to promote the business’s products for them, just the same as how celebrities would work for ads for businesses and help use their fame and well- known image to boost the attention of the brand. Although there are celebrities that own social media, this is completely different from social media influencers. Due to celebrities creating their following through platforms outside of social media that are more difficult to enter, they made their name from the appreciation of fans of their works. In contrast, social media influencers are formed from the appreciation of their social media followings, which truly anyone could be one. This truly helps in the credibility of social media influencers as social media influencers start off by being one of the people of the public and show the public that they too are a part of the average person than they are in a sense a celebrity (Kim, Duffy, Thorson, 2021).
Whereas it does have its advantages, however, social media is still made for the sole purpose of social networking. Therefore, other than gaining awareness and communicating with their followers, there isn’t any certain profit gained through using social media. Although there is beginning to have a rise in business promotions being supported by social media platforms, at the end of the day there is easily no buying intent within businesses using social media.
Furthermore, this also proves why there are usually barely any known brands that have abandoned traditional commercial marketing platforms to switch towards social media, which proves that traditional commercial marketing platforms are still the most advantageous way for businesses to safely generate sales. To put it simply, social media helps businesses gain followers and not buyers.
The main idea throughout social media marketing is its correlation with cultural marketing.
Since social media has become a place where people have now created personas, the public has
started to become comfortable with having the “freedom of speech” in speaking out everything in their minds. This is with the additional factor that most people feel more confident speaking anonymously than in person, due to the fear of judgement without anonymity. That being said, people are presently more able to convey and represent the cultures that they’ve experienced whether it be ideals, tradition, and other characteristics. Making social media a huge platform to represent culture, is one of the factors that allow businesses to gain more attention and followers by representing the people’s culture through the methods of cultural marketing.
Marketing in the end is the representation of the image of the business towards its customers, due to how marketing revolves around how customers communicate with the business.
Therefore, depending on how the business decides to market itself and how the customers view its method, it will eventually show whether it’s good or bad marketing.
2.2 Cancel Culture
“Cancel Culture”, could be defined as an online movement throughout social media that has been used by users to “cancel” or to stop supporting a certain identity for a past problem that has usually recently occurred, this could be in the form of a scandal or any sort of problem (Silva, 2021). For most people, the understanding of “cancel culture” would be “Actions taken to hold others accountable", where this certain culture targets an identity’s action, which is usually negative, to take responsibility for their actions (Hidy, 2021).
Becoming a popularised consciousness within the social media culture in 2017, cancel culture has become a well-used term on the internet. Formed from the concept that “cancel” would encourage a halt towards the support of a scandalous celebrity in a sort of cultural boycott, the slang has now been politically terminalized around the 2020s to define the current social media culture that has overtaken most of the lives of the world, especially the population of the future generations.
Before discussing more on cancel culture, the question could be inquired, how does a person truly get “cancelled”. To explain, “cancel culture” is usually targeted toward identities that already have a certain amount of following or a name for themselves in the world. From there, the “cancellation” usually occurs when these identities make a mistake that ends up getting published in the public eye. These would eventually offend and allow the public to take action by calling out these identities to take responsibility. In addition, to call-outs, there are usually instances where the public users would eventually end up completely expressing their hatred for the individuals for their actions. This movement would create a social influence that would end up growing the community and end up damaging the reputation of the social media identity.
“Cancel culture” started to grow in time as the sensitivity of the public’s opinion started to grow respectively as well. The more sensitive the people became, the easier it became for the identity’s mistake to become nitpicked as a target of “cancelling”. This, in turn, helps conclude how “cancel culture” has become a part of the present social media culture and why it has now been impactfully used as a political term.
When it comes to businesses, they too are a potential target for the “cancel culture” movement.
Businesses receive the same effects that celebrities and influencers receive whenever they make a mistake. However, the reasoning and impact of this movement on businesses in comparison with people may differ.
Regarding businesses and “cancel culture”, their actions are usually criticised based on a social, moral, or environmental factor, just as how businesses are when they become the subject of boycotts. The only difference is that through “cancel culture”, the community is more of spreading hate towards the businesses to ruin their brand image and ensure people don’t use their products. This differs from boycotting as the end goal of boycotting is for businesses to ensure they fix the problem that they have caused.
2.3 Proposition Development
Through context, the risks in applying culture to their marketing strategy truly depend on how a business makes use of its knowledge of said culture. Therefore, depending on the method of strategy that the business decides to use would define the risks of said cultural marketing.
In addition, the risks that “cancel culture” could bring to a business would be a damaged reputation. Although businesses would still be able to continue sales depending on their size as a business, the image would be damaged by social media as “cancel culture” lives within the internet and everything on the internet stays on the internet. This proposition also depends on how properly the businesses make use of said culture.
To simplify, the proposition of business taking risks with “cancel culture” within cultural marketing ranges depending on how the businesses use it because the harshness of being
“cancelled” also depends on the appropriateness of the application of culture.
3. Research Design and Methodology
3.1 Research Methodology
Through this study, qualitative and descriptive media analysis would be used to answer and meet the research questions and research objectives respectively. The qualitative research method would result in the analysis of a collection of non-numerical data that would consist of sources such as text to fully understand reactions and opinions. In addition, descriptive media analysis would also be used to collect data and present the analysis in a constructive form of summary. Through these two methods, a comparative study of the data would be taken to help assist in figuring out the pattern and contrast between the different results observed.
3.2 Data Collection
The research that would be conducted would be sourced through secondary research. Sourcing data from platforms such as articles and social media, the information would be used to establish an understandable opinion of the text source through analysis. Furthermore, the analysis conducted would be the interpretation of social media posts, articles, and other observed products within a textual context, which would then be summarised to ensure the data could be understandable and suitable to answer the research question.
4. Findings and Discussion
4.1 The Good
To begin the finding, there has to be a comparison of the success that businesses could receive by taking risks in cultural marketing. Although there is a higher chance of gaining success with cultural marketing, it usually depends on how the businesses make use of the knowledge they have and could have. Therefore, from there, businesses would rely on whether they appropriately used their method in marketing their products in a way that would not offend the community of the used culture.
4.1.1 Marvel’s Representation of African and Asian Culture
Marvel Comics, a Disney acquired publishing business that is known for their famous fictional superhero characters that have been shown in platforms such as comic books, has been growing as a business through their cinematography where they created an entire film series universe based on their characters, which has amassed over 25 billion dollars worldwide in revenue.
Through this, Marvel has created itself as a platform that has grasped the attention of the majority of people worldwide wide-ranging from children to adults, showing the power of influence that they could bring to the community.
Diversity is not an unknown word for Marvel Comics as they have created a mass majority of fictional characters from different cultures and have brought them to life in the form of movies.
The first example that could be brought up is their take on the character Black Panther. The character Black Panther has been brought by Marvel to the big screen in their 2016 movie instalment of Captain America: Civil War. In this movie, the long-awaited Black Panther was brought in as a supporting character. Creating success with Black Panther’s appearance starring late actor Chadwick Boseman, the forecasted huge success of said character was then planned for a stand-alone movie titled “Black Panther”.
The movie “Black Panther” was released in 2018 starring Chadwick Boseman reprising his role and his movie antagonist Killmonger, starring Micheal B. Jordan. Successfully, the movie became a historic box office hit not just because it was a high-quality film, but because it was a huge representation of African culture. Through Black Panther, African culture had a platform for representation within the worldwide media, especially the American media.
Showing a character based on African descent, Black Panther paved the way for African traditional culture as well as African-American pop culture, though it’s in the entertainment industry. Whilst inspiring viewers to be proud of their heritage, especially the timing of releasing the film on Black History Month, it also influenced African culture for non-African viewers as well (Johnson, 2018).
Another example would include the 2021 Marvel cinematic instalment of “Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings”. Shang-Chi, another Marvel superhero character of Chinese descent, makes his debut on the big screen. Through Shang-Chi, another culture has been represented by Marvel, which is Asian culture. Finally having an Asian lead superhero film from a well- known American media business. Same as how Black Panther was able to represent African culture, Shang-Chi was able to represent the Asian side of culture as well (Mendelson, 2021).
Not only was it a time when Asian culture needed support, due to the Asian hate movement caused after the COVID-19 pandemic, but also when Asian representation was currently starting to build itself with its rise within the entertainment industry. Marvel was able to help boost the representation of Asian culture whilst also working together with other businesses that are currently helping boost the representation of Asia, such as the trending music label 88rising. Shang-Chi was also able to create a historic box office in the film industry within the worldwide media.
This shows how much of an influence Marvel’s cinematic universe had on the world.
Understanding the huge following they had, Marvel was able to use it to their advantage to not only attract their current consumer but also newer consumers as well through the use of culture.
This is a good example of how cultural marketing can create success for a business. Marvel specifically targeted these cultures as they knew that they would be able to attract viewers outside of their current demographic. By doing so, Marvel used parts of their cultures in
marketing their product such as having directors and casts of their respective cultures representing their movies, as well as inviting well-known African-Amerian musicians to represent the Black Panther Official Soundtrack and trending Asian artists to participate in the Shang-Chi The Legend of the Ten Rings Official Soundtrack, working with the 88Rising label (Lee, 2021). Proving that Marvel fully understood how to handle and use culture in their marketing where it would successfully create profit.
4.1.2 Valorant’s approach to adding a new characters
Another great example is Valorant. Valorant, a tactical first-person shooter game developed by indie game development company Riot Games, is currently one of the trendiest games in the past 2 years of its release. In the game, Valorant uses characters of different nationalities to represent their heroes for anyone to use. Through the release of new characters every few months, Riot has a pattern where they would create a cinematic trailer for their “agents”(in- game characters) respectively. Their trailers would contain the characteristics of their characters as well as a glimpse of their national origin.
Recently as an example, on the 12th of January 2022, a new character named “Neon” was released in-game for the public to use. Through a trailer to start the character's reveal, Valorant revealed that the origin of this character was from the Philippines. Through this information, viewers were expecting Riot to use music from Filipino artists as the trailer’s background music, which they have been doing for some of the previous trailers. However, for this current trailer, to viewers' surprise, Riot invested in inviting Ylona Garcia, a Filipino singer, to debut her new song in the debut trailer of their new character (Rappler, 2022).
The trailer created a lot of attention from both the Valorant and Ylona Garcia communities.
Riot was able to help represent the Philippines to the world with the help of an artist that already has become an icon of Filipino representation. This shows that Riot understands how to use culture in marketing its products, as a lot of people eventually felt represented whether they were from the Philippines, South-East Asia, or even Asian.
4.2 The Bad
Presenting the bad side of cultural marketing helps understand the risk and rewards for the businesses. As there is a high risk in using content such as culture toward a target that is currently sensitive to the aspect of identity, this part would show scenarios where they took a risk that was not positively perceived by the public.
4.2.1 Pepsi’s Take on Police Brutality
In 2017, Pepsi released an advertisement for its drink online with a video starring celebrity Kendall Jenner. In this 3-minute short film, the video was aimed as an homage to the resistance where they included Kendall Jenner accompanied by people of different cultures into the scene to join a protest for peace that eventually is blocked off by a number of police officers. As the protest stops, Kendall Jenner is seen stepping to the front of the protest and giving one of the police officers a can of Pepsi. This ended the film with the police officer sipping the can and smiling at the officer beside him, which then transitioned to a Pepsi logo with the caption
“LIVE FOR NOW”. This eventually led to Pepsi as well as Kendall Jenner getting “cancelled”
by the public less than 24 hours after the video was posted.
In the video, there was a lot of misuse of culture that could be noticed. Mainly, how lightly Pepsi discussed the topic of police brutality during the protest. Although their intentions were to pay homage to the resistance and to pay respects to black lives matter, discussing the black
lives matter movement with police brutality in a light-hearted manner was an insensitive mistake. The fact that police brutality, the cause of the black lives matter movement and a problem that is still faced by society, could be portrayed to be easily stopped by a mere can of Pepsi shows how much understanding and care the writer, director, or producers have on this topic.
The other part of the problem consists of the supporting casts of the film. There were scenes where people from different cultures were presented in a stereotypical way. The characters consisted of African-American men dancing to Hip-Hop and an Asian man playing the cello.
This not only shows cultural appropriation, but it also showed how the intention of Pepsi to use the diversity within the casts was to simply use their cultures as a means of showing diversity.
Not only did these characters not help show diversity, but they completely showed how little Pepsi cared about culture (Grady, 2017).
In addition, celebrity model Kendall Jenner also received her fair share of backlash. Context- wise, people were more ashamed that she would let herself be a part of cultural appropriation.
People assumed that she would be able to understand the risks of partaking in an advertisement that misuses culture as she should already have an understanding of how to protect her image as a celebrity. Therefore, she was “cancelled” and made fun of along with Pepsi. This eventually led to the point of her and the company being joked about on the live television show Saturday Night Live.
Pepsi got “cancelled” through its misuse of culture, with people hating, reporting, and eventually making fun of the short film all over social media. Although it is common for businesses to use social movements to sell their product, Pepsi was not able to fully grasp the true ideals of black lives matter in their ads and it backfired on them. Mostly enraging viewers of African descent, these users discuss how much bad history African people have experienced with police due to racism, causing Pepsi to be held accountable. This ended with Pepsi apologising for its ignorance whilst also taking the ad down from anyone else to view.
4.2.2 Burger King on International Women’s Day
Through the current growing movement for gender equality, there is one particular day that is made to support and represent women, which is known as international women’s day. On this specific day in the year 2021, the whole world would talk about representing women and this would include celebrities, influencers, and even businesses. An example of such was the multinational fast-food chain, Burger King.
Burger King UK on international women’s day decided to tweet a message out to the market and gain attention for supporting such a day. Although intentions were understandable, the execution was not. To put it in context, Burger King planned a 2 part tweet post that consisted of “Women belong in a kitchen” and “If they want to, of course. Yet only 20% of chefs are women. We're on a mission to change the gender ratio in the restaurant industry by empowering female employees with the opportunity to pursue a culinary career.”. This tweet not only brought the attention they wanted, but it brought negative feedback as well (Molina, 2021).
As Burger King was getting “cancelled”, users were quick to mention how insensitive and sexist their use of culture was. The culture of ideals within gender equality and the culture of celebrating international women’s day was technically tainted last year by Burger King’s insensitive tweet. This caused online hate towards the fast-food chain and forced Burger King to take accountability with an apology tweet and for the business to delete its viral tweet.
From this context, Burger King didn’t show ignorance towards the topic since they had the right intentions and understanding. However, the way they applied their understanding was insensitive to their target audience and eventually led them to get “cancelled” by not only Twitter users, but other platforms as well.
4.3 Comparison Between Good and Bad Cultural Marketing
Through all 4 examples of cultural marketing, there are a few factors that could eventually define whether cultural marketing is done well or done poorly.
Firstly, what could be a huge factor for good cultural marketing would be to have a person that is a part of the specific culture to help represent the marketing strategy. This could be seen in how Marvel and Riot were able to use artists of their respective genres to represent their cultures through music scores for their visual products. Being able to do this allows culture to be presented without having any high risks since the artists representing are already a part of that said culture. Therefore, marketing the artists would simply market the culture as well. This method was used appropriately as both businesses had a full understanding that they could not just touch a culture without experiencing it firsthand and instead had someone, who has experienced it firsthand, do it instead.
Pepsi was an example of what Marvel and Riot were experiencing at first, which was cultural ignorance. However, not only did Pepsi not realise their ignorance but, they kept through with it, which was the main mistake that Marvel and Riot did not do. To put it in a simpler way, what businesses should do when they lack knowledge and experience on a certain topic they would like to use for their marketing strategy is to find someone who does. It can clearly be seen that Pepsi did not consider this through its use of stereotypes in the cast of its film. What Pepsi failed to realise is the difference between presenting bits of culture and presenting stereotypical racism.
Another factor was Burger King, which could be seen prioritising attention over the true message it wanted to convey to the public. Unlike Marvel and Riot who did not attempt any sort of stunt to gain attention, they sought their attention through the final product and casual advertisements. Burger King, however, did not realise that their first tweet was insensitive and sexist as they were prioritising the attention in their post. To advertise culture, a business must prioritise the message of representation over anything else.
Due to the current sensitive public, misusing the identities of people could be seen as a threat to their culture. Therefore, businesses should firstly not have ignorance and not prioritise the attention over the message. These examples would help reduce the risks of getting “cancelled”
by the public for misusing culture for the benefit of profit.
5. Conclusion
5.1 Summary
To summarise my findings, it could be concluded that the proposed development assumed around the beginning of the test was correct. The risk of a business getting “cancelled” highly depends on the appropriateness of its use of culture. Just as Pepsi was turned into a laughing stock on live television due to them having the more inappropriate application of the culture they were meant to use for their marketing strategy, in comparison with Burger King. Proving
the point that businesses are required to have an understanding of the culture before making use of it, simply put as cultural ignorance.
In addition to the findings on risks of “cancel culture” for a business, there are also findings on how to reduce said risks. Through the use of bringing out people who fully understand firsthand the culture being discussed, a business should be able to work together with them to ensure that the business does not have any sort of cultural ignorance as “cancel culture” is a movement that is filled with a community with sensitive opinions on the topic of identity.
5.2 Limitations and Recommendations
As the research was solely done through the data collected through secondary research, the most impactful limitations are primary research. Considering primary research would definitely give a more in-depth understanding of the opinions of either side of the party, whether it's the community within the “cancel culture” movement or the community siding with the business. Therefore, could potentially create a more reliable analysis in comparison with the use of only secondary data.
Recommendations for overpassing the limitations would most likely be surveyed for whether the target primary data is sourced for the “cancel culture” community or interviews from the community of the businesses that have either experienced or taking the risk of using cultural marketing against a platform that could be faced by said “cancel culture”.
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