Hard to walk the hashtag talk

The response from big international brands to the Black Lives Matter campaign has left me feeling pretty uneasy over the last week. A host of major brands, including Apple, Nike and Twitter, have jumped in to offer their support for the campaign and anti-racism protests that sprang up after the death of George Floyd in the United States. Spotify’s home page featured blacked-out channels, playlists and podcasts and bizarrely inserted a track of silence lasting just over eight minutes into selected playlists and podcasts ‘‘as a solemn acknowledgement for the length of time that George Floyd was suffocated’’.

Apple observed Blackout Tuesday to ‘‘support Black artists, Black creators and Black communities’’ and added an all-black playlist ‘‘For Us, By Us’’, featuring only black artists.

Netflix tweeted that to be silent on the issue was to be complicit. ‘‘We have a platform, and we have a duty to our Black members, employees, creators and talent to speak up.’’

Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared email exchanges with people upset at his support of BLM, saying to one that he or she was ‘‘the kind of customer I’m happy to lose’’.

I’m sure many of us felt we needed to take some action after seeing the footage of George Floyd’s death played over and over again. If you are a huge company, you have a platform and loyal customers and, therefore, the power to do something. But when should they?

As celebs and companies leapt forward to comment and support, it all started to feel a bit contrived to me. Not to mention hellishly risky.

If these companies and individuals are going to be advocates for black rights, I hope they looked behind their own shoulders first.

How many black people do they employ? How are they treated in comparison with others in their organisations? How many of them are in senior management positions?

As consumers, we may not have been that interested in the company’s statistics before, but we’ll vote with our wallets if they’re claiming to want to fight racism but haven’t got their own houses in order. Whipping up some clever lines on social media is a quick fix. It’s easy and costs little more than the hourly rate of the social media manager.

Brands leading with a social conscience is a new trend. In the 90s companies were trying to prove themselves to their consumers through social responsibility strategies, but more recently younger consumers expect brands to be leaders.

Depressingly, one US survey showed more than half the consumers asked now believe brands can do more than the government to solve social ills. But getting it right is risky for brands, with almost two-thirds of consumers saying they would buy, or boycott, a product, based on the brand’s position on a social or political issue.

I don’t know about you, but if I see a brand claiming to take a stand on an issue, I’d like to see more than words on social media.

Consumers are savvier than ever before, so brands need to be authentic to their core when it comes to making a stand on an issue as big as racism, and that’s going to take action, investment and long-term commitment.

The proof will be when we see if these companies are still supporting BLM when it’s gone off the news homepages and been overtaken by something new. Only then will we know if they really meant what they tweeted, or it was just a bandwagon to jump on.

Maybe I’m too cynical – and these big companies and celebs really care about social justice – but I’m not putting my money on it.