A study by Civitas out today say that many people now take part in “recreational grief” - using tragic events and serious causes to assuage their own shortcomings. These are condemned as “attention-seeking” and “phoney, ephemeral and cynical”, as people put on displays of grief (laying flowers and teddy bears, for example) without doing anything tangible about it, such as donating to charities.

The report not only highlights such recent tragedies as the deaths of Princess Diana, Jill Dando and Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, but also wearing ribbons and poppies, and taking part in protest matches. While I can totally agree about how wrong it is to hijack other people’s private grief - it was sickening to read how busloads of people were going to Soham and asking locals to take photographs of them posing by Ian Huntley’s house - the matter becomes greyer if you start looking at people taking part in more political forms of displaying your “goodness”. Although I’ve seen people who use such things as a purely egotistical showing of “anti” without putting any positive alternatives forward, I think it is unfair to liken it to recreational grief. Charities and protest groups definitely exploit their “brand” to get people to carry their message and help them identify with a group (just like people wear Gap or Nike), giving them a sense of belonging. But wearing a poppy or going on protest have underlying good causes, and have been designed from the start to be a public ritual for people to take part in, unlike a family’s private tragedy.

One of these “branded causes” was highlighted in an interesting programme on the BBC last night, about Islamic brands of cola. It followed two brands of cola - Qibla Cola and Mecca Cola - that have been set up as a means of countering the perceived Americanisation of the world by Coca-Cola. These entrepreneurs have come up with the idea that drinking cola can be a form of public protest and have marketed their brands similarly - both used the “if you’re seen buying or drinking this, you are making a statement for others to see” line as a selling tactic, along with donating part of their profits to Islamic charities. Just like the poppy and ribbon campaigns, they’ve cleverly combined a cause with a strong brand, so that people are not only helping towards a cause they believe in, but they can also be seen actively doing it - by drinking from a can of cola in this case, rather than wearing a badge or ribbon. These two brands are going to be infinitely more successful than, say, a simple campaign to boycott Coke by just drinking water and donating your spare cash to charity. Much like the brands of organic and ethically grown food over here, I think they will grow quite strongly in the coming years. It’ll be interesting to see whether these “moral brands” will make as much headway in private enterprise as they have done in the charitable sector.

But as a footnote, it was interesting to note that as much as both brands said they wanted to take people away from Coca-Cola, their brand marks were near-identical to it, maybe as a cunning way of goading Coca-Cola into suing them and earning them extra publicity (they haven’t, yet), but more likely because they just can’t get away from Coke’s pervasiveness - all over the world, red and white equals “cola” in our minds now. No matter how successful they are, the fact that Coke has had that much impact means that they’ll never be able to beat Coke totally. Moral brands may be strong but, sadly, corporate brands are stronger.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2004 at 13:19:01 and is filed under General.