Eclipsed by the halo: ‘Helping’ brands through dissociation

You buy a RED product over here, the RED company buys life-saving drugs for someone who can’t afford them over there. That’s it. So why not shop ‘til it stops. Why not try some off-the-rack enlightenment. We can spend and destroy. We can wear our inside out. You will be a good-looking Samaritan because, and this is very good news for some of us, sinners make the best saints. (Bono Product RED video, Emporio Armani ‘One Night Only’, see Richey and Ponte, 2011, front matter).

When you can get a company with the reach and influence of Bank of America involved in the AIDS fight, that is a very exciting moment. It’s the kind of game changing influence actually that will not just deliver millions of dollars but also keep the heat on the issue as we work to eradicate HIV AIDS from the surface of this world. Bank of America is big…it’s everywhere…because a global problem needs a global company that has heart, the resources, the commitment to end the scourge of AIDS. (Bono, see Bank of America, 2018).

Individual, good-looking consumer saints ally with a global company with game changing influence to end the scourge of AIDS. ‘Helping’ distant others through brand aid humanitarianism may be one of the most successful dissociational branding practices of all. Ibert et al. (2019) remind us that the cocreation of symbolic value in a status market is best understood through complex processes of production, regulation, circulation, and, of course, consumption. These involve the association, highlighting, and framing practices that create economic, semiotic, and moral value, and they also involve the obscuring, distracting, exclusionary practices that the authors encourage cultural economic geography to take increasing interest in documenting and analyzing. Dissociations, we are told, ‘denote a distinct type of proactive and reactive relational work, chiefly aimed at hiding potentially problematic aspects from consumers’ awareness’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 44). Yet we need not restrict our conceptualization to the narrow focus on intentionality. Instead, scholars will be better placed to understand these as a more diffuse set of practices that may result from mixed, unspecified, or even competing intentions. However, the effects of these practices can be seen as dissociating the brand, or its particular product, from negativity through the active, persuasive, virtuous branding with ‘helping’.

Here I will argue that humanitarian ‘helping’ itself can become a branded commodity, as understood by Ibert et al. as ‘a composite of the facets and qualities of a good or service commodity that is deliberately chosen, integrated and communicated by actors as a coherent entity’ (Pike, 2013, as quoted in Ibert et al., 2019: 46). Sharma argues that ‘humanitarian organizations operate today much like brands and speak to us as consumers just as any other brand would do’ (2017: 1). Krause’s (2014) book on international humanitarianism focuses on the selling of beneficiaries themselves as a commodified product that distinguishes NGOs in an ever-competitive funding battle, noting ‘relief organizations hand out shoes and tents and medicines to beneficiaries, but, at the same time, they also sell projects including beneficiaries to donors’–extracting value from them in the process of helping them under circumstances over which they have very little control’ (2014: 41). In Richey and Ponte’s study (2011), Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World, we examined global AIDS funding to understand the implications of selling cause-marketed ‘RED Products’ to support African causes. We developed this new concept of to ‘Brand Aid’ identify when products are sold by celebrities to support worthy causes to Western consumers who want to engage in low-cost heroism. From our in-depth case study, we argued that brand aid is a game changer in both representing and communicating humanitarian possibilities and in convening new actors in response to them. Our representational analysis of the RED engagement showed how complexity in racialized and sexualized scripts of poverty is ignored under the justification of an AIDS emergency. Thus, normal rules do not apply. At the same time, consumption is not questioned as a solution for political problems. Product RED’s beneficiaries are reduced to bare lives, which can be counted in the calculation of ‘lives saved’ as easily as pill counts or merchandise inventory. We argue in the book that ‘Africans with AIDS are presented in smooth, virtual representations in which “global politics” is reduced to style’ (Richey and Ponte, 2011: xii).

Our political economy analysis of the case of Product RED demonstrated how brand aid is pushing the boundaries of traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR) toward disengaged action to save the lives of ‘distant others’. No explicit attempt is made through RED to link its initiatives toward implementation of better work, social, or environmental conditions of the production of brand aid products. The corporations involved in RED have a low level of involvement with Africa in their day-to-day operations—thus they are applying a ‘disengaged’ form of CSR. In brand aid, CSR is moving from conscious consumption in which consumers grade products in relation to how they are produced to compassionate consumption in which products are ‘good’ if they contribute to a ‘good’ cause.

Returning to the two vignettes at the start of this commentary, we can see the ways that the brands are redirecting, negating, and obfuscating relationships between consumption and helping, and that this produces a particular politics of helping and dissociational relations. The registers of value called forth involve power and efficacy, scale and scope, authenticity and even enlightenment, and salvation. But the ‘spend and destroy’ strategic ignorance around global problems like HIV/AIDS dissociates brands like Bank of America from the local political struggles in which it has been embroiled, such as over offering loans to companies that manufacture military-style assault rifles for civilians (Hals and DiNapoli, 2018). According to its Senior Vice President of Enterprise Brand Strategy and Programs, ‘Bank of America represents all of America’ with clients in 50% of households across the country, so their brand activism must be ‘thoughtful and deliberate’ (author’s field notes from Engage for Good Conference, Chicago, 23 May 2018). Dissociational branding through ‘helping’ solve the AIDS crisis could be particularly valuable for the corporation that was forced into the largest settlement in the US history (US$16.65 billion) over accusations that it duped investors into buying troubled mortgage securities, bringing on the global financial crisis ( New York Times, 2014).

Connecting this work to Ibert et al.’s (2019) framework for understanding dissociation makes me think further about the links between the production and consumption of ‘helping’. In their review of ethical consumption, Barnett et al. (2005: 42) demonstrate how ethical responsibility remains as ‘a form of benevolence, reproducing a set of oppositions between active consumers and passive recipients…[which] might well mitigate against…solidarity’. When the ‘ethical’ action proposed by any particular consumption choice is linked to a triggered ‘helping’ of a distant and disengaged Other, as we see in brand aid initiatives, this de-linking of real or imagined ethical obligations across networks of solidarity is ensured, resulting in dissociational symbolic value where ‘ethical’ is moved from the chain linking consumption back to production and deflected onto suffering Others.

In these chains of value, the actual value chains of production become eclipsed by the halo of helping through consumption. What we are actually enjoying is the helping itself, predicated upon the worthy agency of the helpers (consumers and companies) and the legitimate needs of Others. The tools for understanding dissociational distance through the dimensions of organizational, social, and cognitive distancing outlined by Ibert et al. (2019) can be employed to understand the particular deflections of Northern attention away from domestic politics obfuscated through ‘helping’ distant Others. For example, Kapoor (2014, 2018) argues that the global political economy is inextricably entwined with the libidinal economy. In the Lacanian critique, jouissance or the excessive pleasure we derive from doing something that is ‘transgressive, irrational or even wrong’ explains the seduction of late capitalism and relations of ‘helping’ within it (Kapoor, 2014: 1128). Thinking this work through the geographies of dissociation, we can better understand how global development and humanitarianism, with their intricate complications between material and representational chains of values, provide ideal ‘opportunities to create knowledge alibis’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 51). We see the mingling of the dark sides of globalization and trends in global development. Product value chains have become not just longer and more complex (Dicken, 2007; Gereffi, 2014), but ephemerous across time (Tokatli, 2008) and space (Coe and Yeung, 2015). If ethical consumption based on consumer behavior, or what Barnett et al. (2005) frame as the governance of both consumption and the consumer self, was ever possible, it is not any longer. Simultaneously, humanitarian ‘partnerships’ between responsibilized actors tasked with alleviating global suffering are becoming more complicated than ever before (Kipp and Hawkins, 2018; Liverman, 2018). There is so much more from which to dissociate.

This increasing profitability of ‘helping’ can be situated within a larger realm of marketization of humanitarianism (Andreu, 2018; Glaab and Partzsch, 2018; Richey, 2018). The meanings of these shifting global forces as exemplified by the sustainable development goals (SDGs) are only now being taken into account. Mawdsley’s (2018) critical commentary on the financialization of development (see also Christophers, 2015) argues that the SDGs’ call for private financing produces its own normalization of private capital relations. This is itself a dissociational practice that rebrands the SDGs away from the controversies of foreign aid. Returning to the dissociational framework, the SDGs can be understood as ‘a tacit pact of collective nonresponsibility’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 51). In this pact, the ‘institutional interfaces for deepening state-private capital hybrid formations’ (Mawdsley, 2018: 193) represent the strategic agency of the brand owners, and the heroic story of failure as companies and the organizations with which they ‘partner’ see themselves as stumbling forward together (Olwig, forthcoming) represents the habitual agency of the consumers. SDGs provide a normative agenda, a hollowed-out form of CSR, and a complex blueprint for global dissociation through successful branding. Cultural economic geography can deepen our knowledge of how maintaining inequalities can produce surplus value through ‘helping’ that is then part of strategic and habitual forms of dissociation from global ills. Ibert et al.’s (2019) contribution is a useful conceptualization for bringing attention to the value added by not being associated with negativity: What is the value of successful dissociation for the brand? What is the value for the companies, causes, nonprofits, and recipient communities that are not chosen? As so many things become untraceable and branding is about affect, imagination, and the good story you can sell on the side of a shoebox (Budabin, 2017; Ponte and Richey, 2014), the relations to consumption become inherently dissociative as both products and corporations are competing to ally with good feelings. Returning to the normative questions of consumption, I am reminded of Miller’s (2008) seminal work arguing that overarching critiques of consumption are rooted in a fundamental disconnection with actual consumers. Instead, he demonstrates, people who develop strong relationships with things also develop strong and meaningful relationships with people. What then happens in relationships with people and causes commodified into things? We need more scholarship connecting the relationships of power that result from commodification and branded dissociations as called for in the anchor article by Ibert et al. (2019).