Rainbow Capitalism: Does it harm or help

Rainbow Capitalism, which is the use of LGBTQIA+ issues as a means to further a corporate goal such as increasing revenue, or simply as a marketing ploy has been around for a surprisingly long time. With Early movers being Levi & Strauss, IBM, Absolut Vodka and Subaru starting their campaigns in the 60s, 70s and 80s respectively. These companies did something that was undoubtedly unpopular, this wasn’t a populist move or simply “moving with the tide” they were genuinely going out of their way to target a demographic who was taboo and demonised especially during the AIDS Crisis. Most of these companies have retained an ironclad commitment to the LGBTQIA+ Community and have, with all things considered, remained a firm Ally to the cause.

But unfortunately, there are many companies since the early 2000s and 2010s whose stance has not been as logically consistent as Absolut Vodka’s for example. With many of these companies being Fast-food Chains and Financial institutions, who while advocating for LGBTQIA+ Rights in their press briefings and advertisement material, have also lobbied in favour of Anti-LGBTQIA+ Legislation or financially contributed to regimes around the world who have not had a friendly or even neutral relationship with the LGBTQIA+ Community.

Additionally, many of these companies have very inconsistent internal records when it comes to anti-bullying or anti-harassment efforts. With many of them suffering from a lack of cohesion between what corporate says and what corporate does when it comes to high profile cases of bullying or harassment. This is an issue that most of the early movers don’t usually have, due to the tendency or incentive to keep their messaging and actions as ironclad as possible. Such as in the case of IBM who offered domestic partner benefits to same-sex couples back in the early 80s.

This disingenuous attitude towards their own activism stirs up feelings of a general distrust among the LGBTQIA+ Community as well as conversely, stirring up feelings of hatred among communities who are anti-LGBTQIA+ leading to boycotts that frankly, many companies are far too quick to buckle to (I’m looking at you Budweiser and Target). The LGBTQIA+ Community would largely see these inconsistencies as being “gaslight-y” at worst and “clumsy” at best. While many on the right see these inconsistencies as being a sign that the companies “don’t really believe what they’re saying/doing” and that there’s a big conspiracy being pushed by “woke culture”.

There is an progressive argument to be made that this type of Corporate activism actually endangers members of the LGBTQIA+ community, as many who are violently opposed to the idea of LGBTQIA+ people will use the activism of corporations they don’t like as an excuse as to why they harassed, assaulted or targeted, and killed a member of the LGBTQIA+ Community, citing the conspiracy as an excuse to why they did what they did. Additionally, it needs to be said that I’m not necessarily saying that corporate activism itself is bad, but that inconsistent advocacy definitely is.

I think corporate activism is a double-edged sword for those companies that participate in it, on one-hand they get the potential return in the form of revenue, increased donations through purchases that may be eligible as a tax-write off or if they’re genuine about it, furtherment of a cause that they do genuinely believe in. But also on the other hand, they bring attention to a community whose sheer existence is seen as taboo, and they also bring more attention to how they handle these issues internally, which shows how disingenuous they are actually being which again can feed into conspiratorial thinking and further degrade into violent action against either themselves or the community they are advocating on behalf of.

So, is there an answer to this that actually benefits everyone, and may reduce the likelihood of negative extraneous consequences to corporations being active in the causes they claim to believe in?

I believe that there is, but its complicated. I think companies need to re-think their activism quite a bit. Not necessarily whether or not they should advocate for these causes, but instead, how they do it, and furthermore, how they support these causes. I think there needs to be a serious conversation inside boardrooms about how they run donations for the causes they believe in and take serious steps to approach their internal inconsistencies that can fuel the inevitable backlash.

One alternative funding model is rather that waiting around until Pride month to do fundraising, set aside a smaller increment of monthly revenues or profits, and at the end of the year donate that to the causes in question. Or to give a more straightforward example, rather than donating 5% of the sale price of each item sold in pride month, you donate 5% of the entire years profits to charities that support the causes you support. This can be done implicitly, and you can still do a wink and a nod to those causes during pride month and continue on with business as usual.

I understand that what I am saying isn’t necessarily popular, but I think my reasoning is well intentioned in that, I’m suggesting a methodology that is more favourable to the charities and the community as a whole. Even if it does run the risk of potentially angering the backlash even more, due to the implicit nature of it. I think the answer isn’t clear cut for every company or every industry, because of course each company and industry run on a completely different revenue model with different profit strategies. But I do think that a re-think of your activism strategy towards a yearly model brings far more bang for your buck.

Now I’m just going to run the math for you, and also do a bit of bootlicking as well so bear with me for a second. Let’s take Snickers for example, Snickers sells at least 400 million a year and that’s just in the United States (as far as I can tell). Let’s be somewhat reasonable and assume a 30% margin on each bar sold and let’s be charitable and assume a Recommended Retail Price (RRP) of $2, this means that each bar of Snickers generates a profit of 60 cents per bar. If Snickers donated 5% of each bar’s profits for a month that comes to $999,999.99 for the entire month of July. While if you ran advocacy on an annual basis which shows more consistency to your advocacy and looks better on you from the point of view of the communities you are supporting, you would be donating a colossal $12 million per year to the Trevor Project or some other LGBTQIA+ Charity in the United States.

Now what’s the downside? I mean obviously it’s a lot of money but its still pennies on the dollar (literally). But what if you get boycotted permanently? Well, there will be competitors popping up to fuel the boycotters but they don’t have the means or the money to produce product at the rate that Mars does, additionally they don’t have the reach and being anti-progress is not a great sales pitch to prospective employees of those companies especially since they’d have to run razer thin margins to compete with a massive company like Mars. Which in turn would result in horrible wages for employees and that high grind rate through employees that would destabilize them from day-one. So, the risk to Mars running an implicit, year-long donation campaign to certain charities is a win-win with very little in the way of loss to Mars as a whole. Also, additionally the opportunity for some British Airways-Virgin Atlantic scale roast battles in advertising is monumental.

Bootlicking over.

I think that for old dogs in the LGBTIQIA+ advocacy space like Subaru, Absolut Vodka, IBM, etc are at very little risk to contributing badly to LGBTQIA+ advocacy due to the consistency in messaging. But overall, I think a re-think of internal messaging and policies is still needed across the board for any companies, this doesn’t just go for LGBT Corporate Advocacy but also any other kind of advocacy, as with many things, the inconsistencies that exist with one arm of advocacy almost always exist with other arms.