All attacks on corporations are not motivated by the ideology of anti-branding

The targeting of The Body Shop and Nike shows that any corporation, regardless of how hard it tries to project a 'caring' and 'concerned' image, can be subject to attacks and campaigns against it by the anti-brand activists. Indeed corporations are especially vulnerable to such campaigns if they seek to project such an image. Going into bed with the campaigners will not stop a brand from being targeted by those whose central preoccupation is a fundamental and ideological opposition to consumerism and corporations.

All attacks on brands are not, however, motivated by anti-branding and its ancillary ideologies. Attacks upon brands are also motivated by three other broad categories of reason. The divide between these categories is not, however, a clean one. There is a certain overlap between these categories, and also between them and anti-branding.

Campaigners who want to change a specific corporate policy

Many campaigners are genuinely interested in changing this or that policy of this or that corporation, and see the boycotting and pillorying of specific corporations as a way of achieving this. A good example of this kind of activism is the originally US-based, Internet-led, campaign to stop Western corporations from investing in Burma. Those behind this campaign are concerned with the Burmese government's appalling human rights record and suppression of democracy, and believe that foreign investment will shore up the regime. The campaign has been highly successful in persuading Western consumer brands not to use, or to cease using, suppliers and sub-contractors in Burma, and also to stop them from marketing their products in Burma. This campaign has persuaded, amongst others, Levi Strauss, Macy's Department Stores, Liz Claiborne, British Home Stores, Heineken, Carlsberg, and Pepsi, after losing a $1 million contract with Harvard University as a result of the campaign, to disengage from Burma.97 The campaign has even persuaded, after they were threatened with a consumer boycott, major Californian wine producers to stop marketing their wines to Burma.

Consumer brands are, obviously, those most easily subject to consumer boycotts, so tend to be the obvious and most effective targets of such campaigns. Interestingly these campaigns about Burma have been very significantly helped by that bogeyman of anti-globalisers of both left and right, billionaire financier and prodigious philanthropist George Soros and his laudable Open Society Fund. The Fund, more widely associated with Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, seeks to help build the institutions of civil society and create the right conditions for democracy and the rule of law to flourish. It has a special Burma Project which is the leading source of information on Burma, its human rights situation and, from a critical perspective, on those companies investing there.98 Campaigning on the Burma issue is ongoing. The Burma Campaign UK is currently targeting Premier Oil for its exploration work and investments in Burma. It is also urging consumer boycotts of Triumph International, under the slogan 'support breasts - not dictators', for manufacturing bras in Burma, and even Lonely Planet travel guides for publishing a guide to Burma and thereby facilitating tourism to Burma.99 The campaigns against tourism to Burma have been so successful that the international style hotels operating in Rangoon apparently have occupancy rates of only 15 to 20 per cent.100

Unocal, the Taliban and Afghanistan

One of the corporations investing in Burma, the US oil company Unocal, has also been subject to a class action in the US courts concerning alleged human rights abuses by the Burmese government in the areas in which it was operating.101 Class actions have become a major tool in campaigns against specific corporations and are used far more broadly than just the well known cases of suits against tobacco companies. Unocal was also subject to a similarly motivated campaign, long before September 11th when the Taliban and al-Qaida became the lead items on the nightly news, over its involvement in Afghanistan. Between 1995 and 1998, Unocal was part of a consortium that was planning to build a gas pipeline across Afghanistan. The pipeline was to transport gas from Turkmenistan's gas fields, across Afghanistan, to where there was a market for it in Pakistan.

The Taliban took control of Kabul and most of Afghanistan in 1996. The Taliban's appalling treatment of women soon became a major issue for US feminist groups. Unocal's involvement in the pipeline came in for fierce criticism and was subject to a vociferous campaign by American women's rights organisations. Unocal's response was, that by its presence in Afghanistan, it could improve the lot of women in Afghanistan. It, for example, promised to employ women on the project, made an issue of the treatment of women in its dealings with the Taliban, and funded community projects in Afghanistan. The other foreign companies involved at the time in pipeline projects in Afghanistan were Argentine and, perhaps more pertinently, Saudi Arabian, and made less of these human rights issues. The more general point is that it is precisely large Western firms, ie, those most easily targeted and amenable to pressure from campaigns, which are most likely to be accountable for their actions, have precise and rigorous codes of conduct and insist on better employment and also environmental practices. When these Western firms pull out, they are often replaced by other companies which are less concerned with these issues and are also more difficult to hold to account. This argument, however, does not have the obvious moral attractiveness of calls for not investing in countries where serious human rights abuses are occurring.

The campaign against Unocal even asked the Californian Attorney General to have Unocal dissolved for this issue amongst others. Initiating moves to dissolve a company, or have a corporate charter revoked, has become a favourite tool in targeting corporations; it is largely a publicity-seeking or issue-raising exercise, since it has little practical chance of success. Unocal became the symbolic totem of concern for the women of Afghanistan. Its involvement in Afghanistan was interestingly as much of an issue as the US government's own ambivalent relationship with the Taliban regime in its early years.

The Clinton government's relations with the Taliban worsened, according to leading commentator on Afghan affairs Ahmed Rashid, largely because of pressure from women's rights organisations, especially Feminist Majority. Osama Bin Laden's presence in Afghanistan was at this stage apparently a secondary issue. In the light of these worsening relations and the continuing onslaught upon the company by Feminist Majority and others, and the bad publicity these campaigns engendered, Unocal withdrew from the pipeline consortium in 1998. 102

The campaign against Unocal shows how companies have today become the target of campaigns which would previously largely have been aimed at governments. For all the rhetoric of companies becoming ever more powerful, campaigners seem to realise that corporations are often more amenable to pressure than governments. This is even true when the issue is as far removed from, and has as little to do with, the boardrooms of America as the burqas Afghan women were forced to wear by the Taliban.

Ilisu Dam and Balfour Beatty

In the UK, an example of how effective the targeting of corporations for such ends can be even when there is no obvious consumer brand to boycott is the case of the construction firm Balfour Beatty and the Ilisu dam in Turkey. Here again a company - Balfour Beatty - was attacked as a proxy for a government. The Turkish government wished to construct a dam on the Tigris River in an area of the country predominantly populated by the minority Kurdish population, who have long campaigned for independence or at least autonomy. The Ilisu dam was attacked for its alleged environmental impact, and because it would have displaced, depending on which figures one chooses to believe, up to 30,000 or 78,000 people. It would also have drowned various sites of historical importance to the Kurdish people.

An international consortium of construction firms, including Balfour Beatty, was to have built the dam. Balfour Beatty asked the British government, through the mechanism of Export Credit Guarantees, to underwrite its £200 million contract for this project. The UK government said it was minded to do this in 1999, subject to various human rights and environmental criteria being satisfied. Balfour Beatty faced a massive campaign against its involvement in this project, spearheaded by Friends of the Earth and the London based Kurdish Human Rights Project.

The campaign also became something of a rallying cry for anti-capitalists. It is an example of how an issue can gain support from those trying to stop a specific project and raise concerns about a specific subject, dam building, and also from those trying to use it as an example of the evils of capitalism. Why state-sponsored dam building should be seen as a specifically capitalist vice, especially since its most vociferous adherents were a group hardly known for their capitalist ardour - planners in the Soviet Union and their overseas economic advisers and acolytes - is never properly explained.

In 2001 Balfour Beatty pulled out of the Ilisu dam project, saying it had failed to meet the companies ethical, environmental and commercial criteria.103 Although not the sole factor and played down by the company itself, arguably the most important reason for Balfour Beatty's decision was the vociferous campaign against the company. Certainly the activist community saw this decision as a victory for their campaign. Mark Thomas, anti-capitalist television comedian and campaigner, put it thus: 'The proposed Ilisu dam is dead! We've won!'.104 The anti-dam campaigners notched up further victories with the withdrawal of the dam's Italian contractors, Impregilo, and, in February 2002, UBS, Switzerland's largest bank group, withdrew their financial support from the dam. UBS cited concerns about the dam's social and environmental impact for their decision.105

The Ilisu dam project affected a very substantial contract for Balfour Beatty, and is in the core area of the company's activities. This is not an example of a company pulling out of a peripheral business activity. The campaigners were not calling for more account to be taken of environmental or human rights considerations but for the company to entirely pull out of the project. These factors, combined with the extra difficulty of targeting Balfour Beatty compared to a more visible consumer brand, would make one think that this is the least likely campaign against a company to succeed. The fact that it was a success shows just how powerful a campaigning tool the targeting of specific corporations has become. If it is true that a company such as Balfour Beatty can be successfully targeted, it is all the more true of high street consumer brands. The fear companies have of damaging their reputations has meant that campaigning organisations have become massively more powerful at the expense of corporations in general, and especially at the expense of consumer brands.

Campaigners who see the market as 'the only game in town'

The second category of campaigns not primarily motivated by the ideology of anti-branding are the significant numbers of organisations and activists who may have much sympathy with the wider anti-branding arguments, but believe that they are not realistic. They feel that since the consumer society is, so to speak, the only game in town, more can be achieved by playing along with it and cajoling or persuading corporations to change their practices. This group of organisations include many of the well established, household name NGOs and itself consists of a diverse spectrum. Some, such as Greenpeace International and Friends of the Earth are more confrontational - indeed, when they feel the circumstances demand it, very confrontational - but are willing to sit down with corporations when they feel it is appropriate. Greenpeace International and Friends of the Earth are, for example, currently behind The Body Shop endorsed Stop Esso Campaign calling for a boycott of ExxonMobil and its consumer brand Esso. The rationale behind this campaign is firstly that ExxonMobil have funded research and organisations, such as the Global Climate Coalition and the American Petroleum Institute, which are sceptical about man's contribution to global warming.

Secondly it is that, unlike the huge investments of other oil companies such as BP and Greenpeace International's erstwhile foe Shell,106 ExxonMobil are not investing sufficiently in renewable energy and research into energy alternatives.107 The leading Guardian columnist and voice of liberal Britain Polly Toynbee endorses the campaign not so much for what it will do to ExxonMobil, but as a consciousness-raising exercise to draw attention to what she believes is Britain's over-reliance on oil, and historic under-investment in renewables.108

Such consciousness-raising efforts, and attempts to move the public debate in a specific direction are often as much the motive in boycott campaigns of this type as any direct impact upon the company. They also have the advantage for the campaigners that they often persuade other corporations which have not been targeted to change their behaviour for fear of being next in line.

For this type of organisation, alongside the stick of boycott campaigns, there is also the carrot of co-operation. Greenpeace International is happy to say nice things about some corporations. It is, for example, much friendlier towards Shell than it once was, and has endorsed IKEA's stand on the sourcing of its wood products to ensure that they do not come from ancient forests, and also IKEA's decision to withdraw all PVC products from its stores.109 The rhetoric of Greenpeace International and Friends of the Earth is increasingly that they are not against capitalism and the market per se, but that they want to move toward a more eco-aware market where corporations grasp the vast commercial opportunities offered by new environmentally friendly technologies and the demands of 'ethically aware' consumers.

Other organisations, such as Jonathan Porritt's Forum for the Future, are consistently more intent on quiet dialogue and are attacked for this by many more radical campaigners, such as George Monbiot.110 Des Wilson, formerly head of Friends of the Earth and then corporate affairs director of the British airports operator, BAA, argues that greens 'have a better chance of promoting change by working with business and industry, instead of engaging in the kind of invariably useless confrontational activity enjoyed by the punk end of the movement.'111

It would be wrong, however, to see a clear divide between those who seek to reform the consumer society and those who wish to replace it. For, however much the anti-branders like the notion of a dichotomised world, these two strands of activism blend seamlessly into one another. Just as anti-branding organisations may receive support from some corporations and many individual anti-branders are still ambiguously attached to 'fair trade', 'ethical' consumerism and its associated brands, more moderate campaigners share much, although not all, of the anti-branders' world view. Even Jonathan Porritt, who has also been head of Friends of the Earth, and was at one point the leading voice of radical environmentalism in the UK but is now widely seen as the unofficial environmental adviser to Prince Charles, acknowledges that his analysis still has much in common with that of the radicals. He says 'thank God for that absolutism! Over the last 10 years, I have learned just how much those working "the inside track" - with companies or government - depend on those hammering from the outside. Many of the companies we work with, for instance, live in dread of being targeted...and that's no bad thing.'112

If a general ideological distinction can be ascertained between the anti-branders and these other campaigners, it is that the latter are more likely to see materialism per se as the problem. They also tend not see this materialism as being purely the result of the machinations of the brands, and feel that consumers as a whole share responsibility for it. Thus for them the corporations alone are not the villains; wider social attitudes also need to change.

Campaigners who wish to close down a specific industry

The final category consists of those campaigners who are targeting individual corporations with the intention of closing down a specific industry, which they believe to be inherently immoral. Some of these campaigners may share the anti-branders' anti-capitalist outlook, but their objectives are not the same.

A classic example of a campaign which is seeking to shut down specific industries is the radical animal rights organisations, such as the US based PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This is a campaigning organisation, with a budget of almost $18 million in 2000,113 which seeks an end to the fur trade, the livestock industry, zoos, and much else that they perceive as the exploitation of, or as cruelty to, animals. PETA has, for example, persuaded Marks & Spencer, amongst many other retailers, to stop selling products made from Indian leather, because of how cattle are allegedly treated in India.114 In the UK, PETA are probably best known for persuading various super models to pose in the nude as part of an anti-fur campaign and their 'Crap on Ken' campaign against Mayor of London Ken Livingstone for withdrawing the licence of Trafalgar Square's pigeon feed vendor, the birds' primary source of food.

PETA has also targeted Coca-Cola for planning to market milk to children. PETA describes milk as a 'cruel, racist drink' (they claim that 'milk is a health hazard' and that 'most African-Americans and racial minorities are lactose-intolerant'), and argue that 'promoting it to children is tantamount to child abuse'. They call upon Coca-Cola to promote soy-based products instead.115 Their objection is to milk itself, not primarily because of any health risks they might perceive, but because it is an integral part of the livestock industry. Unlike the anti-branders it is not to Coca-Cola, its marketing, or the use of lifestyle images to sell drinks that they object. PETA are more than happy for soy milk, or any other vegan product, to be aggressively promoted in such a manner.

A campaign which is in the same class, albeit closer to mainstream prejudices while simultaneously being somewhat more esoteric, is Greenpeace International's successful strategy of quietly persuading 21 major airlines flying out of Norway to refuse to transport blubber or whale meat.116 This is part of their ongoing campaign against whaling. Such campaigns are not directed at discrediting consumerism per se, but at putting an end to practices, and in some cases whole sectors of the economy, of which the campaigners disapprove.

Greenpeace International's whaling strategy is just one example of campaigners approaching third parties - companies that are not directly involved - in order to get at their real target. This strategy is usually employed by those who seek to target a specific industry which itself, such as the Norwegian whaling industry, is not amenable to pressure. A UK or US boycott of whaling produce is unlikely to have very much impact.

The campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences

An altogether more sinister example of this kind of strategy has been employed by the militant British animal rights group, SHAC or Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.117 The Huntingdon Life Sciences corporation carries out experiments for medical research on a contractual basis; half this research is carried out on animals. SHAC realised it would not get very far by trying to persuade or put pressure upon a company one of whose primary business activities is animal experimentation to quit animal experimentation. So it decided to target the pension funds and other collective investments which held shares in Huntingdon Life Sciences, the banks which operated nominee accounts through which individuals or pension funds could hold shares in Huntingdon Life Sciences, the banks which lent money to the company, and even individual private shareholders.118

This was a remarkably successful operation. One by one, vast UK and US corporations caved in and refused to have anything to do with Huntingdon Life Sciences, many to the extent of not even handling shares in the company for their clients: Barclays Bank, Citigroup, HSBC, Merill Lynch, Charles Schwab, T.D. Waterhouse. The Royal Bank of Scotland refused further funding to the company. Huntingdon Life Sciences was only saved from closure due to moral support from the UK Labour government's Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury, and funding from a US investment firm with a low public profile in the UK, the Arkansas-based Stephens Group. Since then, various pharmaceutical companies, and medical research charities have threatened to withdraw their accounts from the banks which gave into the animal rights activists' demands.119

SHAC's campaign has come very close to achieving its aim of destroying Huntingdon Life Sciences, and it is continuing. SHAC's supporters in the USA have targeted the Stephens Group. This company has now also withdrawn its support for Huntingdon Life Sciences, although it says this decision was a purely commercial one.120 If SHAC ever succeeds in closing Huntingdon Life Sciences down they will move on and seek to destroy others who are involved in the work of animal experimentation.

SHAC employed all manner of strategies in their campaign. These included using the techniques of anti-branding in their leaflets and on their web sites in associating the retail banks with the negative image of animal experimentation and its alleged cruelty, and thereby selling their extremist message to a wider, sentimentalist, audience. SHAC's objectives, however, were far more specific and thus amenable to a clearer outcome. The actions of these animal rights extremists is illustrative of how a small, well-organised campaign can intimidate some of the largest corporations in the world, the very corporations which the anti-corporate activists claim are engaged in a global corporate power grab. Polly Toynbee described the behaviour of the banks and finance houses in not standing up to SHAC thus: 'The cowardice is breathtaking. At the first whiff of gunpowder the captains of industry, the big banks, stock brokers, financiers ... turned tail and fled'.121

Established campaigners have better access to the media than corporations

In all these three categories, the established, seemingly moderate, campaigners have, contrary to widespread perception, the advantage that their voice is far more clearly heard in the media than that of the corporations. A study by the highly respected Brookings Institution of press coverage in the liberal New York Times, conservative Wall Street Journal and the more specialist Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report shows that 'corporate representatives are a mere one per cent of all lobbyists quoted by the reporters for these three outlets'.122 While it is true that corporations' voices are heard more clearly via trade associations, who receive 30.1 per cent of such coverage, 46.2 per cent of lobbyists quoted are from citizens' group, overwhelmingly liberal, progressive citizens groups. What is more, representatives of such liberal, progressive organisations are far less likely to be described in pejorative terms than others, especially corporate representatives.123

The targeting of corporations by non-progressive campaigns

While most of the examples of campaigns so far given are generally perceived, rightly or otherwise, as progressive causes, the politics of those targeting an individual corporation are not necessarily progressive. Pro-death penalty, anti-crime, campaigners, for example, successfully targeted Sears, the second largest US retailer. Sears had launched a private label line in its department stores for fashion brand Benetton, which was expected to generate $100 million in sales in its first year. Benetton is known for its topical hard-hitting advertising and decided to run an advertising campaign critical of the death penalty featuring death row prisoners. The campaigners succeeded in getting Sears to sever its contract with Benetton.124 Benetton has also had to apologise to families of US murder victims and has paid $50,000 compensation to a fund for victims of crime in Missouri.125

The USA's largest retailer Wal-Mart is subject to a boycott campaign by those who still have an emotional sympathy with the long lost Confederate cause. Wal-Mart will no longer stock Piggie Park barbecue sauces because Piggie Park's owner, Maurice Bessinger, likes to fly the Confederate flag of the southern rebel states outside his restaurants.126 Having said all this, anti-branding is perhaps the most important reason why individual corporations are being targeted, and why the targeting of corporations is becoming ever more prevalent. It has turned attacks upon corporations from merely a mechanism for achieving some other demand into the major ideological tool of those seeking to proselytise for their anti-capitalist faith. But does it succeed in doing this?