Brand Activism - A different Paradigm for Capitalism ​

This dissertation focuses on the new economic model, called Brand Activism, born around the early 2000s and analyzed by different scholars in managerial literature during the past 10 years, including the “Father” of modern marketing Philip Kotler. The analysis of this new type of business model rearranges what can be considered as the ultimate goal of modern organizations, that is to say profit, and gives a new contextual dimension to large entities and their role in modern society. Indeed, with the increasing lack of trust from new generations like Millennials and Generation Z, and the increasing awareness and cultural progress all around the world, thanks to globalization, large companies, and even countries, are facing what can be described as a shift of paradigm: customers no more want just a profitable company which sells optimal goods or perfectly delivers its services, their demand is now focused also on the role that the same company has with its stakeholders, the environment, the society... or, to be more specific, the purpose of the company. More precisely, the elaboration and the description of this new type of business paradigm will follow the already existent path inherent to the idea that, to obtain and maintain a strong success in the long run, companies should switch from the more convenient customer-centric approach to a more comprehensive stake-holder approach, capable of giving relevance not only to materialistic dimensions but also to Corporate and Social Responsibility. Even if this new model of business was born first in the USA, now it’s spreading across some of the most developed economic entities around the world. The concept behind this dissertation is to explore this idea of purpose-oriented entity and to compare it to the already existing ones. In fact, starting from the existing literature and the managerial books available, this project wants to elaborate the aforementioned idea of a new possibility of economic growth for the most developed companies and countries, and wants also to question its efficacy, creating a comparison with the existing ones like the “Consumer Capitalism”. Since the purpose associated with a company can have various forms and can manifest itself in different ways, during the analysis of the Brand Activism phenomenon, in this dissertation the methodology utilized will be the Comparative Case Study, which is a type of case study that describes the relation between two or more entities (in this case companies) in order to provide a deep comparison between the profit-oriented ones and the purpose oriented-ones in the value creation, trying to differentiate all the possible perspectives. Furthermore, another important aspect described during this type of comparison will be the trust and the appreciation that new generations have for companies which actively take actions to bring a consistent change in society, against the level of aversion that they have for companies accused of greenwashing or inconsistent with their purpose. After the elaboration of these two comparisons, the relevant information that will emerge will be studied and discussed in order to obtain more precise data on which to base the research and, once analyzed all the necessary data, the discussion will be about the results offered by the data and their implications in the analysis of this type of economic model, trying to better comprehend if it could be suitable as a proposal for a different theory of economic growth against the well know consumer-based one. In the end, this project will try to implement the already existing literature and to answer the question on the effectiveness of brand activism as a possible alternative to the capitalistic model that has characterized the twenty-first century. ​