How corporations rebrand poverty

The other week, when I was shopping in Margate, I saw a number of posters from Boots urging support for its campaign against ‘hygiene poverty’. Barely aware of the term, I looked it up online and was soon presented by claims that much of Britain is gripped by a crisis of personal neglect because of penury. According to the charity In Kind Direct, more than a third of people have either had to cut down on their hygiene essentials or go without them completely due to lack of money. The same charity warns that 43 per cent of parents of primary schoolchildren have had to ‘forgo basic hygiene or cleaning products’ because of the cost.

These figures sound terrifying but do they bear any relationship to the reality of modern life in our country? As someone who lives in Thanet, which has the second highest level of child poverty in the south of England, I am only too aware of real deprivation. It is impossible to walk through parts of Margate without being struck by the atmosphere of decline and despair, from boarded-up shopfronts to dingy bedsits. But this — genuine, everyday poverty — does not make for good adverts.

As such, poverty has been rebranded by corporates who like to portray themselves as campaigners against social injustice — in the case of Boots, that not enough people can afford their products. What outrage! This association with anti-poverty is a low-cost, high-profile way to signal corporate virtue — a kind of marketing. Mission statements from Procter & Gamble sound more like the utterances of a democratic socialist movement than a capitalist manufacturer, pledging to ‘create a company and a world where equality and inclusion is [sic] achievable for all’. In the same vein L’Oreal, home of the advertising slogan ‘Because you’re worth it’, now trumpets a social and environmental solidarity programme.