Decolonizing Digital Marketing and Communications: Why, How, and When?
By Jazzmin Gota and Paul David Terry
“Storying through remembered and recognized knowledges are one of the ways that oral traditions may serve to disrupt dominant Western conceptualizations and re-tellings of the tangled histories of colonial relations”
(Literacies of Land: Decolonizing Narratives, Storying, and Literature, by Sandra Styres, in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View)
What does it mean to decolonize, and how does this concept relate to marketing and communications? How do our contemporary practices continue to operate within colonial frameworks?
Our goal of decolonizing digital marketing and communications is to integrate these tools to envision how we can build a future that centers shared community values toward being in relation. Our mission is to highlight Indigenous knowledge and emphasize the significance of culture, community, language, food, ideals, and principles that move us beyond a neocolonial vision. This approach aims to return Land to caretakers who prioritize dignity and strive to realign social, environmental, and communal spaces respectfully. We seek to show that decolonization is more than just a symbolic act, as demonstrated by Tuck and Yang in Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.
Our work aims to raise awareness of Indigenous knowledge, emphasizing the importance of culture, community, language, food, ideals, and principles as a pathway for returning Land to caretakers who prioritize dignity and respectfully realign social, environmental, and communal spaces. Through our work, we strive to demonstrate that decolonization transcends mere symbolism and materializes in our actions.
This blog aims to foster authentic connections with our communities through the principles of human rights, where respect, dignity, and reciprocity are understood through critical awareness. By doing so, we uplift cultural knowledge and create spaces for community engagement, moving away from viewing people as targets and towards inviting people to collaborate in co-building a different communications model.
Whether it be through gaining attendance for events or fundraising for our causes, our goal in decolonizing MarComms is connection—as opposed to capitalistic metrics of success measured by infiltration and domination. To understand this framing shift, we will focus on the Two-Way Symmetrical model of public relations outlined by Grunig and Hunt (1984), extended through a humanizing, human rights-based lens:
Four Models of Public Relations
Purpose: Mutual understanding
Two-way communication
Balanced effects
Nature of research: Formative, evaluative of understanding
(Adapted from Grunig and Hunt, Managing Public Relations, 1984, p. 22)
Modes of respect and stewardship are intertwined throughout communities, as noted in 1839 “well essential and appropriate attributes of sovereignty, from a period extending into antiquity, beyond the records and memory of man” in the Act of Union Between the Eastern and Western Cherokees. In extending from the Two-Way Symmetrical model, we will focus on fostering a decolonial mode of open and honest communication, grounded in our understanding that the first three public relations models have not always been the default in all communities.
We recognize that communicating through the two-way symmetrical model has been a value longer than the formal concept of communication models has been in existence. Our intent is to decolonize marketing and communications through understanding that moving away from propaganda—the one-way asymmetrical model—as a primary means of engagement. When we align the values of our community ties and ground ourselves in engagement that promotes both the institutional and the public, we can decolonize marketing. We intend to expand the two-way communications model developed by Grunig and Hunt, and extend it to forward knowledges of Indigenous people on relationality as methods for decolonizing MarComms through a human rights and humanizing framework that accounts for community, is in relation to community, where the goal is decolonization.
Achieving two-way symmetrical communication within a human rights framework involves engaging with the community. It’s a longer trajectory for the development of engagement, but like crowdfunding, ways we increase social capacity, it’s about listening and responding in ways that provides community benefits.
Here are a list of readings that inspired our post above!
Blog post: Prologue: Reimagining Marcoms through a lens of decolonization
Duncan-Andrade, J. (2009). Note to Educators: Hope is Required When Growing Roses in Concrete. Harvard Educational Review. 79. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.2.nu3436017730384w
Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Seabury Press.
Krawec, P. (2022). Becoming kin: An Indigenous call to unforgetting the past and reimagining our future. 1517 Media. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv29sfz3r
Smith, L.T., Tuck, E., & Yang, K.W. (Eds.). (2018). Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429505010
Stein, S. (2022). Unsettling the university: Confronting the colonial foundations of US higher education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., https://doi.org/10.56021/9781421445052