Monetising misery: family division is no cause for celebration

As someone who grew up on 90s / early Noughties celebrity culture, I was as gripped as the next person by Brooklyn Beckham’s recent social media confession. Knowing, as I do, how desperately publicists court the gutter press, I actually hadn’t really believed there was a massive problem with the Beckhams. Or, more honestly, I just hadn’t thought about them at all.

My husband (ex-Smash Hits journalist and therefore equally as enamoured with ancient pop culture) and I talked about it for about ten minutes. Then we got on with our lives, as I imagine most other people did. But I’m aware that I’m lucky. I’ve never had a catastrophic falling out with my parents. I’ve never had to walk away from them. 

But I know people who have, and for them this wasn’t idle celeb gossip. It was a reminder of something painful and deeply personal. Every comment dissecting who’s to blame lands differently when family estrangement isn’t abstract.

And this is why I think all the reactive marketing ‘stunts’ around the Beckham family issues feel a bit ‘off’: lazy at best. We talk a lot about newsjacking as if speed and relevance are the same thing as judgement. They’re not. When a cultural moment is rooted in real human fallout, cleverness alone doesn’t cut it. Sometimes it actively backfires.

So the questions are boring but necessary:

Who is this serving?

What’s the actual point?

And does earned attention here do anything other than make noise?

Take On the Beach’s “Family Fallout Refund” (aka the Beckham Clause). I applaud the speed of the execution, the wall-to-wall tabloid coverage and bucketload of social noise.

But there’s something faintly grim about spotting a very public family rift and thinking: How do we monetise this? Attention was earned, but at what cost. It didn’t drive any brand reappraisal for me (someone who regularly books family holidays) and almost certainly doesn't resonate with the ‘warm, welcoming and inclusive’ brand values. 

Then there’s ‘Unplugged’, who named a cabin “Brooklyn”, stating: “Families are complicated, we get it. That’s why our latest cabin, Brooklyn, is specially designed to escape in-laws and family drama.”

This one’s interesting because it probably helped brand awareness (I’d never heard of Unplugged before and now I have), but ‘awareness’ is not always positive. Does anchoring your brand to someone else’s unresolved family breakdown actually leave people feeling good about your brand, or just momentarily entertained?

A few years back, I developed an Inclusion Impact Window, partly because I was so irritated by Iceland’s “Hot Tick Buns” moment (IYKYK). Was it genius or something designed to dramatise and exploit difference for commercial gain? (Clue - the latter). 

As brands scramble to stay relevant in a culture that moves at breakneck speed, the nuance really matters. Because if the honest answer to “who is this serving?” is “our brand” and only our brand, it’s unlikely to create long-term brand love. It’s far more likely to quietly erode trust.

Not every moment of cultural attention is an invitation for brands to capitalise on. Sometimes the smartest move is just to do nothing.

If you’d like to know more about our inclusion impact window and how we combine cultural confidence with cultural intelligence so that teams can make better decisions, please do email us at info@theunmistakables.com.