Brand aid

Today’s marketplace is inundated with products supporting humanitarian causes that promise to give aid to beneficiaries, provide ‘good feelings’ to consumers and promote the brands of corporations and humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs), thereby allowing consumers to ‘buy into development’. Consumers sipping a bottle of Belvedere vodka can ‘save women and children with AIDS’’, ethical shoppers buying a pair of TOMS shoes automatically donate a pair of shoes to ‘a child in need’ and parents more concerned with African education than with high sugar intake can purchase Fruit Gushers that provide a limited number of laptops to schoolkids in Rwanda. The commodification of humanitarianism (turning people and causes into marketable things) is thus linked to the privatization of help (replacing public donors with private philanthropy). This augmentation of the marketplace for development signals the deepening engagement of new actors – corporations, celebrities, and Western consumers – in humanitarian financing, or what Stefano Ponte and I have called ‘brand aid’.

Brand aid refers to how products are sold by celebrities in support of worthy causes to Western consumers who want to engage in low-cost heroism. For example, think of the way the U2 singer Bono has promoted ‘RED’ products to support and promote African causes, including global AIDS funding. On these terms, RED is pushing the boundaries of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) towards disengaged action to save the lives of ‘distant others’. The corporations involved in RED have a low level of involvement with Africa in their day-to-day operations; no explicit attempt is made through RED to implement better work, social, or environmental conditions of production. Brand aid initiatives are therefore moving CSR from conscious consumption in which consumers grade products in relation to how they were produced, to compassionate consumption in which products are considered ‘good’ if they contribute to a ‘good cause’.

Such practices raise important questions about what the linking together of corporations and celebrities in the practice of helping actually does to humanitarian causes, to donors and recipients. Commodified compassion could become a way of strengthening relationships between consumers and producers to push toward fairer relations, but it can also become limited to financing humanitarianism through ‘cause-marketing’. There may appear to be a radical democratization of development, where everyone can become a philanthropist like Bill Gates through consumption of the ‘right’ product. But by doing so, do they also legitimate, or otherwise distract from, the relations of inequality and poverty from which they emerge?

Celebrity humanitarianism

Selling products and events to ‘help’ distant others, from brand aid to Band Aid, has linked celebrities and corporations to global humanitarian causes in unprecedented ways. Correspondingly, the development sector and the celebrity industry have increasingly formalized relationships, based on a cadre of full-time celebrity liaison officers in NGOs, and specialized talent agencies linking performers to philanthropic causes. It also leads to new celebrity-led organizations, such as Madonna’s Raising Malawi and Ben Affleck’s Eastern Congo initiative, that use fame to fashion authenticity for their development interventions, establish organizations that are considered credible development actors through endorsement and funding, and orient accountability upwards towards the celebrity fan-base in the Global North rather than downward toward the intended beneficiaries.

In these roles, celebrities are not simply individuals undertaking idiosyncratic acts of benevolence, but partaking in an institutionalized series of practices of appearing designed to produce a profit for other people beyond the celebrity themselves. Thus, celebrity, business, and humanitarian realms intertwine through global and local renditions of moral value. In this way, celebrities can serve a pedagogical function, teaching people how to feel and act, by embodying the appropriate way to document and share feelings of compassion. As Lilie Chouliaraki suggests in her book The Ironic Spectator, ‘the tearful celebrity, the rock concert, the Twitter hype and the graphic attention are prototypical performances of post-humanitarianism.’ Celebrity humanitarianism can write an affective script for citizen-subjects and market-subjects to follow, a point which has not escaped the attention of politicians and business elites who frequently ally themselves with these performances.

Thus, celebrity humanitarianism can work to structure the institutional forms of life that it seeks to reflect upon, in other words, as we argue in our book Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power, by ‘staging inequality’. While there was clearly no ideal past when humanitarianism or North-South relations were more authentically concerned with mitigating the negative effects of poverty and inequality, we should still remain critical of the legitimacy that elites gain through celebrity engagement. For instance, as celebrities (and corporations) become increasingly involved in shaping the meanings of humanitarianism, it is arguable that the field itself will be increasingly shifted toward the elite, the profitable and the photogenic. At the heart of the humanitarian impulse is the push for modernity that we see in both colonialism and development. This is a form of continuity. In order to understand the changes brought by celebrity humanitarianism, we need to examine the actual practices of elite leadership in different contexts – one example being the way that cultures can be drawn to the ironic as much as the iconic, thus destabilizing the new ‘do-gooding’ norms being established.