In recent years, the concept of woke marketing has gained increasing visibility within marketing communication literature, referring to brands’ engagement with normative values such as social justice, equality, inclusivity, and ethical sensitivity. Despite its growing prominence, however, the conceptual boundaries and analytical scope of woke marketing remain largely underdefined. Existing studies frequently conflate the concept with related approaches such as brand activism, purpose-driven marketing, and corporate social responsibility, treating it as a broad rhetorical label rather than a distinct analytical category. This conceptual ambiguity risks diluting the critical and normative foundations from which the notion of “wokeness” originally emerged.

This study approaches woke marketing as a conceptual problem rather than a managerial strategy, examining its transformation from a historically grounded form of social and political awareness into a symbolic mode of marketing discourse. It argues that, within contemporary marketing communication, woke has increasingly shifted from a position of critical engagement to a representational and rhetorical device through which values are aestheticized, commodified, and strategically mobilized. In this process, socially grounded concerns are rearticulated as communicative signals, often detached from their political and ethical origins.

By situating woke marketing within debates on value representation and symbolic positioning, the study conceptualizes this shift as a form of conceptual drift and semantic dilution. Rather than assessing the effectiveness or authenticity of specific campaigns, the paper focuses on clarifying what woke marketing signifies—and crucially, what it does not signify—within the broader landscape of value-oriented marketing practices. Through this conceptual delineation, the study aims to reposition woke marketing as a theoretically coherent construct and to contribute to greater analytical precision in future research on value-based brand communication.