Brand Activertising: From Profit-Purpose to Social Positioning

Organizations And The Public Space

Whenever people needed to produce something too complex for the individual task, they created organizations, which can be seen as human associations built for the fulfillment of a certain objective. But they are more than that. According to Ruão (2016, p.63), organizations can be understood as a “cultural phenomena, centered on the production of systems of meanings, or as socially constructed realities, based on physical and mental structures”. And it is precisely in this production of meaning that organizations have been changing the way they relate to their various audiences.

Parallel to this change in the communicational behavior of organizations, another significant change has been happening, in front of us, in recent times: the awareness and consequent focus and importance given to social causes (Chan, 2023). Indeed, much has been debated about global community problems (Robins & Dowty, 2008) that have been progressively and consistently invading the public space, often accompanied by long spectrums of positions and arguments that create rich debates around them. In fact, “today’s culture of political unrest, protest and populist sentiment is prime opportunity for advertisers to connect with audiences in new ways” (Benner, 2018, p. 1). According to Vredenburg et al. (2020), in the increasingly polarized society that we’re living, several controversial issues are serving as catalysts for many brands to define problems of social interest and refocus on doing social good (p. 456). Some of the main drivers of its assiduity in modernity have been the movements of affirmation and empowerment of ethnic, cultural, religious minorities, but also of class, sexual orientation, and gender, among others, related to movements of anti-precariousness and dignified conditions. And whatever position, whether citizens, individually, or organizations, as social groups, take or not on these issues, the inevitability of their presence in everyday life is a reality that cannot be ignored.

From an Habermasian perspective, the political sphere, namely liberal democracies, given their natural and inevitable public nature, have the inescapable duty to address these issues, creating legislation or opinions that affect or concern defenders or opponents of a certain cause. On the other hand, it is not just citizens, grouped or individually, who form civil society and are in permanent contact with various social issues. Also, companies and corporations, namely private ones – derived from the bourgeois public sphere (Habermas, 1962) – have been progressively asserting themselves as a third domain with its own interests, sometimes collective and corporate, clearly demarcated from those of the State. Its distance from government authorities and its clear interest in the autonomy of its instruments of power guarantee it a simultaneously integrated, but truly specific role in civil society. These corporations, which we will call private from now on (as opposed to public, statal) maintain, therefore, relations both with single individuals and with the State, but traditionally with a “selfish” perspective.