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October is Breast Cancer Awareness month and if you didn’t know that, you were probably living in a cave. Every NFL game has had a bunch of oddly placed pink items on their uniforms and fields. Television and billboard advertising is up in major cities around the country.
I get it. I can’t think of too many people that haven’t been impacted by breast cancer in some way. So yes, awareness is good. It seems like companies have gone a little overboard on the using the awareness month to hawk their own products though. So what do I go to the store to find?
Pepsi + Pink + Obama-like logo and message = Success? I don't think so.
Of course, I came to find out that it wasn’t just Pepsi but a bunch of products in my local Fred Meyer store (a subsidiary of Kroger). The program aims to give three million to breast cancer. Sweet, right?
Riding The Line
How do you ride the line between promoting awareness and promoting your brand (for promoting awareness)? Can you do both effectively or will it always come off as transparent and pathetic? Should we expect companies to do good things without having to promote the crap out of it?
And not that this is the component of this particular promotion but how good is a company that will donate some proceeds of the sale to a charity? So if you’re willing to buy our product, then we’ll donate it (oh, and we’ll throw in the fine print that we won’t donate more than a few thousand bucks).
The Real Problem
If people start to become cynical about a company’s charitable donations, will companies stop donating money to these causes? And if they become cynical about partnerships between companies and charities, will the associated charities see a lowered reputation? The real problem is that the charities could potentially suffer from cynicism and companies that pull out of their causes. Companies don’t need charities to hawk their wares but charities often need all of the promotion they can get.
What do you think about companies using good causes to promote their products? What works and what doesn’t?
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Comments
10.12.09
I personally don't but into the whole pink month. My grandmother died from complications of chemotherapy she obtained for her breast cancer,
so I do have some relationship with breast cancer.
It is a coorporate cash cow, that ribbon being something Estee Lauder got legal counsel on many years back, as did I believe "Self Magazine", when the originator of the ribbon, (at the time it was peach) was not about to let it be used for exploitation.
I don't think cynical is what we should be, but educated. Yoplait until recently touted that pink ribbon while their product contained a known carcinogen, many of the major organizations that promote breast cancer awareness are heavily vested in or supported by large pharmaceutical companies, and where there is nothing inherently wrong with that, there is much less money going toward research for a cure and prevention, something even the American Cancer Society has complained about.
Mammograms for instance are always touted as their project, free mamograms - when fact is most states have either free or low cost mammograms for women who can't afford them. What no one has and what none of this "pink ribbon" money goes toward is helping women whose " free mammograms " are indicative if malignancy, get treatment and follow-up.
So not cynical but wary. Do your research, don't fall into the trap. Give to something that really means something. Give directly. Don't just buy an Avon product and think you've really done something, in all likelihood it's only fifty fifty that you did.
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