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June 2, 2009, 12:43 PM ET
Does Cause Marketing Replace Virtue with "Mindless Buying?"
Cause marketing may be defined as mutually beneficial collaborations between a for-profit business and a charity. The Product Red campaign, for example, has raised nearly $60-million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria thanks to consumers buying select “red-branded” items from companies like Gap and Apple that include a donation as part of the purchase price.
Angela M. Eikenberry, assistant professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, casts a jaundiced eye on what she also calls “consumption philanthropy.” Writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, she says such schemes have “hidden costs” that make them “unsuited to create real social change” and that they “replace virtuous action with mindless buying.”
Ms. Eikenberry writes that such philanthropy is based on “individual market transactions” which distract participants from collective solutions to collective problems.
“This distraction steers people’s attention and collective resources away from the neediest causes, the most effective interventions, and the act of critical questioning itself,” she writes. “When people link their charitable donations to their preexisting consumption decisions, they need not exercise a deeper sense of moral responsibility. They need not take any extra steps (beyond, say, choosing a different brand of yogurt) or make any additional sacrifices.”
“More broadly,” she continues, “In the absence of people’s active and effortful moral engagement, corporations and their profit-driven needs set the tone for acceptable ways of being philanthropic. As a result, people’s genuine benevolent sentiments are co-opted for profit, and their care is reduced to a market transaction.”
What are your thoughts on cause marketing, which Ms. Eikenberry points out has grown rapidly, raising an estimated $1.3 billion in 2006?
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