FPD Book Review: BRAND AID
Once in a while a nectarous, readable volume arrives from the academic press. Impressively matched by the rigorous research that went into it, Lisa Richey and Stefano Ponte’s Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World presents a titillating account of the star-studded RED campaign that whets the appetites of all kinds of readers. The University of Minnesota Press publication uncovers the seductive power of marketing– propped up by iconic personalities like rock star Bono –that has created an unusual chemistry between consumption of designer products and compassion in the form of contributing funds to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a private foundation that provides Antiretroviral drugs to Africans suffering from AIDS.
The rather ingenious title captures the essence of the book– popular brands such as Armani rebrand themselves more positively through the sale of RED products while international aid that has generated intense fatigue recently gains a refreshed image. Brand Aid also evokes images of Band Aid, a charity another rock star, Sir Bob Geldof, founded in 1984 to provide food aid to millions of Africans facing colossal starvation, which was immortalized by the song Do They Know It’s Christmas. As well, it is tempting to think of the figurative meaning as temporary fix of a product derived from Johnson and Johnson’s Band-Aid often used to dress light wounds. After reading Brand Aid, of course, one may regurgitate on the latter and wonder if RED is indeed a sustainable solution to a complex global public health challenge.
Equally atypical is the composition of the engineers of consumption and compassion. In what they call the “Aid Celebrity Trinity”, the authors chronicle the collaboration of the charismatic rock star Bono, the Ivy-League economist Jeffrey Sachs, and the physician Paul Farmer. These stellar accomplishers pitched RED effectively to major corporations, governments, and non-profit organizations by positioning themselves as embodiments of popular consensus. Their success was augured by Bono, clad in his signature wrap-around polycarbonate sunglasses and a black leather jacket over a dark gray sweatshirt, who comfortably swayed the panel of suited up politicians like the former prime minister of the U.K. John Major who praised him as “my mentor and tormentor” during Davos 2006. Celebrities provide, the book claims, a path of least resistance and a fresh face of credibility that is reshaping the cumbersome international development system. Aid celebrities are unlike other celebrities who engage in doing good in that their endorsements are sought after as opposed to them plugging their charitable actions to the philosophies of existing institutions.
RED is also a “virtual salvation” of Africa in the way victims of AIDS are given a chance to live a few more years with the distribution of ARV drugs orchestrated by celebrities. In this state of affairs, Africa becomes the “Rock Man’s Burden”– reminiscent of the continued perception of the well-meaning and wealthy in the developed north as the ones who should take it up on themselves to change the lots of the dejected. Marketing strategies deployed by the campaign and technical tools splashed on the pages of glossy magazines construct a transformable reality through images that capture attention among shoppers but may not necessarily reflect the contexts in which suffering takes place. The focus centers on presenting a “before and after” transition that shows an emaciated and dying African who, then, after getting ARV drugs turns into a happy, healthy individual. To the extent that careful poses and photographic after-effects create compelling images that spur consumers to shop RED, the reality they bring to surface may be so distant that, arguably, it reduces AIDS to a challenge that can only vanish if more ARVs were available. To drive their point home, the authors cite a July 2007 issue of Vanity Fair that portrays these interventions as the “Lazarus Effect”, a biblical reference in the Gospel of John to Jesus who resuscitates the dead Lazarus of Bethany to life by miracle four days after he died.
Richey and Ponte cogently analyze the questionable legitimacy surrounding traditional aid to Africa that has spawned much debate recently and how RED attempts to restore its relevance by assembling a new kind of public support with the help of big corporate brands. They take an in-depth look into the works of many writers who deprecated aid going to Africa as “waste” and as a model that spins the continent into perpetual cycles of stunted development as well as continued oppression. Zambian Goldman Sachs economist and author of New York Times bestseller Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo, for example, advocates shocking African economies by stalling aid within five years and considering other investment options such as the sale of sovereign bonds to finance market-driven development matched by a parallel increase in foreign investment instead. The book lays out how the RED trio–Bono, Jeffrey Sachs, and Paul Farmer– counter this thesis and pump a new genre of energized optimism by innovatively ushering in a public-private partnership directed towards saving lives that reconfigures the roles of former donors like UN organizations.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is another subject the book examines extensively. Competitive environments compel big brands to protect themselves from all kinds of threats including suspicions about conditions of production. The composition of their consumers has changed not only with increasing demand for luxury goods globally but also the relocation of production facilities to emerging markets. Motorola’s market share, for instance, is expanding in Africa as Gap sources its products in Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, and South Africa. These companies, thus, now face a generation of shoppers that make CSR more than a domestic undertaking. In RED, companies found a cause that raises their profile without interfering in the way they do their business. The disengaged and distant approach of RED, the authors impel, endears it to big brands because it delimits its role to contributing funds to a larger pot that is the Global Fund while it conveniently co-brands different companies under a bigger tent.
Brand Aid also explores the rise of “Causumer Culture”, conscious shopping for a cause. Contemporary consumers prefer and demand products that are ethically produced and transparently certified. The strengthened role of consumer activism leverages freedom of choice to exert influence on how companies do their business together with environmental concerns that have become issues that matter to consumers less marginally than ever before. Although “causumers” still constitute a fraction of the general population of consumers, their actions together with persistent NGOs led companies like Starbuck’s to address concerns that relate to improved payments to farmers. As such, RED provides a good branding umbrella that assures cause-conscious consumers and, at the same time, helps companies build brand equity through their participation.
As much it is richly informing, however, the book leaves a few questions unanswered. Contextual details on the treatment of AIDS in Africa that the authors stress RED dis-embeds are rather anemically presented, which would have made this harmonious collaboration of an anthropologist and a development scholar even incisive. Ethnographic illustrations would have come in handy to see the contrast between the constructed reality of virtualism in RED campaigns and concrete experiences on the ground. Brand Aid successfully makes its case that creative initiatives like RED leave structural issues of underdevelopment largely unchanged but, at times, the book stays in its academic shell, that is, it seems to overly analyze the nuances of the problem without necessarily sketching out what a solution looks like. These obvious drawbacks, nevertheless, do not diminish to joy of reading such a provocative and insightful account of the controversial transmutations of international aid.
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Mohammed Hamid Mohammed is the Africa Regional Editor for Foreign Policy Digest.
