RED, Pink, and Conflicts of Interest

In Chapter 9 of “Practices of Looking,” Sturken and Cartwright mention different ways that corporate marketing and advertising can help to generate consumer health awareness and also promote charity venues. The chapter explains that the charity benefits from donations and exposure, the corporation benefits from their image of benevolence, and the consumer benefits from the good feeling of supporting an important cause. Previously this year, I posted a link to the blog about something I found very interesting, the branding of different diseases by companies. I would argue that the endorsement of different health problems by companies is not only to generate consumer awareness for health issues, but also to capitalize on consumers and gain large amounts of profit.

This made me think of the RED organization, which nine major companies are associated with in order to help donate money to the AIDS cause in Africa. The RED organization is an easy and effective way to donate and help a cause, and consumers can feel good about buying a RED product knowing that some of the proceeds get donated. RED is perfect because the money spent for merchandise you would buy anyway is going to a cause with no extra effort by the customer, as long as the customer chooses to buy a RED product rather than another. In this case, if both of the products were the same and one product donated a portion of the cost to AIDS, I would bet that the consumer would choose the one that supported the cause, as a simple way to feel they are contributing. Integrating a donation system within certain brands and consequently capitalizing off of it raises a moral question, that although it is great that the RED campaign is raising funds for AIDS, is it okay for them to also earn a profit while doing so?

Clearly, the RED organization knows how consumers operate, and are taking advantage of that in these campaigns. However, RED has become a look and a socially conscious trend and fashion statement, especially with GAP’s RED T-shirts and endorsements by celebrities, most notably Bono. Therefore, using this form of corporate marketing has become very beneficial for the companies involved in the RED campaign. Situations like this continue to be debated; when corporations endorse a cause in order to gain a profit, and the public is unsure of where, exactly, the money is going. This most frequently happens with Breast Cancer, where products with pink ribbons on them tend to sell more than others, but the corporations cap their donation to the cause at a certain amount, despite the people who continue to buy the product assuming that they are contributing to the cause. Granted, this debate escalates when focusing on the ties between the private corporate interests of pharmaceutical companies in relation to the business of health and national healthcare, and the debate continues today.