Corporations have used opportunities to appeal to liberal consumers on a range of social issues as more of a “branding exercise” than an effort to make substantial changes, Journalist Zaid Jilani said in a Monday interview with The Hill.TV’s “Rising.”
Asked about corporations’ “wokeness,” Jilani said corporations are acting out of the interest of their shareholders.
“So a corporation can’t really take an ideological or moral position. They take a position that they think is good for their bottom line,” Jilani said.
“I think in this case they’ve seen … a growing kind of portion of liberal consumers, tend to be upper income, highly educated, who view their spending behavior as a function of their politics. So I think that if they portray themselves as being, for instance gay friendly, supportive of Black Lives Matter, supportive of some feminist causes, then I think they see that a means of growing their business by appealing to those consumers,” he said.
“But appealing to consumers is not the same thing necessarily as actually taking steps that would improve the status of the groups that they are discussing or improve the status of their workforce or even cheaper products and better products for consumers,” he added. “I think that a lot of this has turned into a branding exercise for corporations.”
Watch the full interview above.
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