Performative Marketing Borrows Attention. Responsible Marketing Keeps It.

Liquid Death asked Americans to mail their urine to the AI data center of their choice, selling a limited-edition jar to collect it in, and the gag points at something real. Data centers run on water, drawing millions of gallons a year to keep their servers cool, and the AI build-out is pushing that demand into towns already short on supply. A recent poll showed seven in ten people didn't want a data center built anywhere near them, a wider margin than opposed a local nuclear plant. A water brand making light of the water AI drinks lands on a nerve. The spot is funny. Whether Liquid Death has earned the right to make that joke is a separate question.

Lola Bakare is a CMO advisor and inclusive marketing strategist who owns be/co, the boutique consultancy she founded in Philadelphia, and wrote Responsible Marketing, the Kogan Page book that turned the practice into a working framework. She spent years inside PepsiCo and Dell before going independent. Since then, she has made the same argument to marketing leaders: a brand can enter a difficult conversation and leave with more trust than it walked in with when it brings something substantive to it.

"If you're not addressing these matters in a way that is real, substantive, meaningful, and measurable, you're going to end up getting called out for it," says Bakare.

Four moves keep a campaign clear of the performative

Her book gives a brand four things it can do: solve real problems, create real opportunities, tell real stories, and influence real policies. Do any one of them and the work has something behind it. "If you do one or more of these four things, you are going to protect your brand against veering into the performative," she says.

Put the Liquid Death campaign through those four questions and it fails the first one. "It's a hot topic they wanted to be involved in, but they're making a joke out of something that really matters existentially to society," she says. The joke eats the issue without giving anything back to it, and consumers clock the difference on sight. "Where's the connection point? You think we're stupid? We could send our pee without buying your water," she says. "Don't assume that people are going to laugh at anything you do just because they've been along for the ride."

She'd have fixed it in one move. "Maybe you're not going to solve the problem. Obviously that would be impossible. But can they address the problem?" she says. "What organizations are doing substantive work in this category that they might partner with, and create something funny within the realm of their brand voice that draws attention to that organization? Can you actually platform someone who's already doing real work in this space?" The humor stays. The campaign acquires a spine. The work clearing juries this year did the same thing, fixing a real problem in a customer's life instead of a messaging problem the brand made up.

Brand relevance decides which conversations are yours to enter

Her problem isn't that a water brand waded into a water fight. That part's fair game. "Anything having to do with water conservation is within the realm of what I talk about as brand relevance, which is an important key to veering away from the performative," she says. The category handed the brand a legitimate entry point, and the execution declined to use it.

Having a right to speak and having something to say are two different things, and audiences tell them apart instantly. The giveaway is timing. A brand that did the work before the moment lands differently from one that discovered the moment in a briefing, and craft can't backfill the difference.

Impact and commercial growth run the same loop

The objection Bakare hears most from marketing leaders is that this work costs money and returns goodwill. "I'm not saying that because you choose a tactic that aligns with responsible marketing, you are going to commercially thrive. It still takes threading the needle correctly, like anything else," she says. "I'm not going to say that because you bought a Google ad, you're going to get results." What gets her is the double standard, since no other line in the marketing mix gets asked for a guarantee before it's funded.

She'll commit to one thing: the sequence. "Real social impact leads to real reputation impact, which leads to real commercial impact, which leads to more real social impact, because you proved it out," she says. Bobbie is her example on the policy end. The infant formula company co-created the Constance C. McDaniel Medically Necessary Infant Formula and Donor Milk Act, known as Connie's Bill, and its team spent a day on Capitol Hill in May lobbying for its introduction. Its brand chief has been explicit that policy change is the goal, with celebrity campaigns pointing at a hotline rather than a product page, and the company has grown into the third-largest formula brand in the country while operating that way.

Her longer-horizon example is e.l.f. Beauty, which reported its 30th consecutive quarter of net sales growth in August. The numbers are public. Whether social impact is what produced them is her read, not the filing's. "They are a brand that has proven that their investment in substantive social impact really moves the needle commercially, because they get it right," she says. What she's describing on the upside is the thing every marketer is chasing anyway. "The ultimate thing every marketer is trying to do is create an emotional connection with their consumers that leads to that brand love, where people see us as an extension of themselves."

Getting it wrong the right way

The last chapter of her book is about getting it wrong, and she treats it as routine, not catastrophe. "You will get it wrong. It doesn't sink you," she says. The damage comes down to the response, and the response is simpler than most companies make it. "Acknowledge that that's what happened. Learn from your mistakes; apologize sincerely without making excuses about why you did the thing."

She uses her own former employer as the case study. PepsiCo's 2017 Kendall Jenner spot remains one of the most cited misfires in the category, and the company took it without losing its footing. "They didn't try to defend themselves. I challenge you to go back and find a statement from anyone at PepsiCo saying here's why we did that and we defend our actions," she says. The brand kept investing in the work afterward.

The brands that get hurt do the opposite by getting defensive. "There's a hubris and what I call corporate fragility that leads people to want to be defensive in these moments, where simply exhibiting humility makes it go away so quickly," she says. "People are very forgiving."

Attention like this is borrowed, never owned. What a brand puts back is the only part it gets to keep.