Cuyamaca College Product Red Co The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing Paper Project # 1: Constructing an Account of an Argument (100 pts) Reading: Angela M.

Cuyamaca College Product Red Co The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing Paper Project # 1: Constructing an Account of an Argument (100 pts)
Reading: Angela M. Eikenberry, “The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing”
Prompt:

Nike has a long history of embracing social issues in its commercials. Recently, in 2018, the company partnered with Colin Kaepernick for the campaign “Believe in something” to raise awareness of inequality and prejudice. This summer, Nike used the Women’s soccer championship for its commercial “Never stop winning” to address the so-called glass-ceiling. Is such marketing embracing causes effective – and sincere? Angela M. Eikenberry discusses this question in her article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and your task in this 3 page paper (1,000 – 1,100 words) will be to first construct an account of her argument, explaining the rhetorical situation (considering the intended audience, context, purpose), identifying her main claim, analyzing the structure she uses to develop this argument, and demonstrating how he uses various forms of evidence to establish her credibility and trustworthiness.

Your paper shall explain clearly howand whythe author uses whichevidence (and other rhetorical strategies) and whether she succeeds in persuading her intended audience. Also, discuss the author’s way to establish ethos (i.e. credibility and trustworthiness), and whether and howshe establishes enough ethos for the reader to accept her position. Your analysis should consider how the author uses specific details and evidence to appeal to this audience, and whether (and why/why not) you respond to these appeals, considering your individual context. For example, you may belong to GenZ, a generation sometimes called “philantroteens.”
Criteria:
DescribeEikenberry’s argument – main claims as well as context, purpose, and intended audience – to a reader unfamiliarwith this text.
Analyzethe evidence, explaining how it relates to the main claim and how it guides the audience’s understanding and persuade the listeners to accept the claim.
Incorporate specific examples from the text as evidence for your points.
Use an effective structure, which carefully guides the reader from one idea to the next, and demonstrates the ability to both introduce – including a title that indicates the topic and direction of the essay – and conclude an academic essay.
Edit thoroughly so that sentences are appropriate for an academic audience and the paper adheres to MLA requirements.
Key learning outcomes:
Describe elements of an argument–claims, methods of development, evidence, (persuasive appeals, style), context, audience;
use all aspects of the writing process–including prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading;
choose effective structures for the writing;
identify devices an author has used to create cohesion or to carry the reader through the text; guide a reader from one idea to the next in the own writing;
comprehend words and phrases central to understanding a reading.
effectively select material from written arguments and comment on it;
edit for grammar, usage and MLA conventions.
Assignment Structure

Intro

1.Develop an attention getter that leads into the topic.

2.Intro the text and explain rhetorical situation (incl. context).

3.Describe central claim as well as the main argument. These are two different rhetorical elements.

4.Metadiscourse section – describe what the paper will do.

Body

1.Analyze the various elements of the argument and how they advance the claims and persuade the reader (such as evidence, counter argument/rebuttal, structure).

a.Include a discussion of HOW these strategies affect the reader and WHY the author may have chosen them.

b.Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these elements. Is the main argument persuasive? Is the argument supported by a variety of types of evidence? How credible, relevant and sufficient is the evidence to prove the claim? Conclusion

1.Significance: So what? Who cares? Reflection: What does it matter? Has the author impacted your thinking/views on this topic? If so, in what way? This is a good place to consider your own context (see prompt). The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing
Angela M. Eikenberry, Stanford Social Innovation Review Summer 2009
From pink ribbons to Product Red, cause marketing adroitly serves two masters, earning profits
for corporations while raising funds for charities. Yet the short-term benefits of cause
marketing—also known as consumption philanthropy—belie its long-term costs. These hidden
costs include individualizing solutions to collective problems; replacing virtuous action with
mindless buying; and hiding how markets create many social problems in the first place.
Consumption philanthropy is therefore unsuited to create real social change.
I do my main charity work once a week—at the grocery store. Like some of you, this week I
bought organic yogurt that not only is healthier for my family and the Earth, but also supports
nonprofit environmental and educational organizations. I also picked up snack bars that promote
peace (no kidding!) and salad dressing that funds various (unnamed) charities across the country.
For all of this hard work, I rewarded myself with some Endangered Species Chocolate, which
helps “support species, habitat, and humanity,” according to the company’s Web site. Delicious.
All of these purchases are examples of what my colleague Patricia Mooney Nickel of Victoria
University and I call consumption philanthropy.1 Also known in the business world as causerelated marketing or cause marketing, consumption philanthropy pairs the support of a charitable
cause with the purchase or promotion of a service or product.
One example is the Product Red campaign, which California politician Robert Shriver has led
and U2 lead singer Bono has promoted since its launch in 2006. By purchasing select Product
Redbranded items from companies like Gap Inc., Apple Inc., Dell Inc., and Starbucks Corp.,
consumers can also support nonprofits like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and
Malaria. The most well-known among the Red products, the Red iPod, costs $199, with $10 of
that amount going to the Global Fund. So far, Red and its corporate partners have contributed
more than $59 million to charity.
Consumption philanthropy seems like the ideal solution to many of the problems our society
faces today. It allows charities to raise much-needed funds and to educate consumers. It helps
corporations increase their profits, bolster their reputations, and distinguish their brands. And it
lets consumers feel that they are making a difference in the world. On the surface, all seems rosy.
Yet lurking beneath this rosy surface are some disturbing consequences of combining
consumption and philanthropy. I do not mean the often-cited risks of cause marketing, which
include misalignment between the charity and the corporate sponsor, wasted resources, customer
cynicism, or tainted images of charity. Most critiques of consumption philanthropy focus on
these pesky problems of execution without questioning its basic underlying assumption—that
consumption philanthropy, if done well, would do good for all.
I disagree with this assumption. Consumption philanthropy individ ualizes solutions to collective
social problems, distracting our attention and resources away from the neediest causes, the most
effective interventions, and the act of critical questioning itself. It devalues the moral core of
philanthropy by making virtuous action easy and thoughtless. And it obscures the links between
markets—their firms, products, and services—and the negative impacts they can have on human
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well-being. For these reasons, consumption philanthropy compromises the potential for charity
to better society.
Short-Term Fix
Strategies that combine consumption with philanthropy have skyrocketed in the last two decades.
Among corporate sponsors, cause-marketing expenditures went from almost zero in 1983 to an
estimated $1.3 billion in 2006, according to IEG Inc., a Chicago-based firm that tracks causerelated activities in the United States. At the same time, consumers increasingly demand that
companies practice philanthropy and social responsibility. A 2004 Cone/Roper report found that
86 percent of American respondents were “very or somewhat likely to switch from one brand to
another that is about the same in price and quality, if the other brand is associated with a cause.”
As a growing body of research attests, consumption philanthropy does offer short-term benefits.
Many corporations that sign on for cause-marketing campaigns enjoy higher sales and wider
publicity for their products and services, improve their image with consumers, expand their
markets, and boost employee morale. For example, cosmetics giant Avon Products Inc. says that
cause marketing on behalf of early breast cancer detection and research has improved its
relationships not only with its predominantly female customer base, but also with its
predominantly female sales force.2
Meanwhile, charities gain legitimacy in the marketplace because they are seen “as viable
partners in commercial ventures and not just as beggars pandering for the corporate dollar,” write
Australian marketing professors Michael Jay Polonsky and Greg Wood in their review of causerelated marketing.3 Through cause-marketing campaigns, charities also generate revenues, attract
volunteers, raise awareness of their cause, and receive extensive publicity. For instance, the
Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation’s partnership with Yoplait—Save Lids to Save
Lives—has raised millions of dollars for the foundation while also increasing public awareness
of breast cancer (and strengthening Yoplait’s brand image).
Consumers also seem to win from participating in cause marketing. They get additional
information about a charity or cause, as well as a convenient way to spend their disposable
income on charitable causes. For example, consumers who were planning to buy chicken noodle
soup or cereal anyway can choose to buy the “pink” Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or “pink”
Cheerios to meet their needs, while also providing funds for breast cancer research.
Lone Rangers
Yet the long-term effects of consumption philanthropy are troubling. The first of these effects is
that consumption philanthropy—which usually takes place as individual market transactions—
distracts its 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.
The growth of consumption philanthropy reflects many people’s confidence in the power of the
market (that is, the institutions, systems, and places where buyers and sellers exchange things) to
deal with all sorts of social problems. That confidence stems from the ideology of neoliberal
economics, which prevailed worldwide—at least before the current economic collapse. This
ideology “views all aspects of human society as a kind of market,” note management scholars
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Brenda Zimmerman and Raymond Dart. 4 For instance, in his 2005 book, The Fortune at the
Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, University of Michigan
management professor C.K. Prahalad portrays the world’s poorest people as an untapped market
niche whose salvation will come when they are fully integrated into the market. Likewise, in
response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush told Americans that our best, most patriotic
recourse was to go shopping.
But one problem with relying on consumers to right the world’s wrongs is that most consumers
are not very interested in or capable of righting the world’s wrongs. The primary goal of people
in marketplaces is to make choices that fulfill their self-interested, individual material needs and
desires. In this capacity, they generally have little impetus to consider “the public” or “the public
good.” Caught up in the transactions of buying and selling, they have little opportunity to
question the fundamental principles of corporate organization. And unlike citizens who share in
the collective authority, responsibility, and dignity of public life, individual consumers have little
reason to wonder how larger political-economic structures might create social problems in the
first place.
Recent research indeed shows that when money enters the picture, people’s more charitable
impulses often fall by the wayside. University of Toronto management professor Sanford DeVoe
and his colleagues, for example, have shown in laboratory experiments that participants are less
likely to volunteer for a charity after calculating how much money they earn per hour than they
are after merely reporting their annual salary. Putting a price tag on time, it seems, makes people
less willing to give their time away “for free.” 5 (For more information, see “The Stingy Hour” in
the winter 2008 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.)
The research evidence also shows that individualized consumer approaches to philanthropy
actually shift giving away from more collective approaches. Professors Karen Flaherty, currently
at Oklahoma State University, and William Diamond of the University of Massachusetts
Amherst found in a 1999 study that cause-marketing campaigns hinder future donations to
charities because consumers think that their purchases are donations. 6 So when the plate passes
for charitable contributions, respondents to cause-marketing campaigns feel that they’ve already
given. Likewise, findings published in 2004 in the Journal of Marketing suggest that consumers
who support socially responsible companies believe that they have already done their
philanthropic share.7
Consistent with these findings, Zimmerman and Dart tell the story of a person who attended a
book sale held by a nonprofit organization. The person bought a hot dog, a drink, and a couple of
books at the event. When the nonprofit asked for donations, the attendee demurred, thinking that
the purchases were a sufficient contribution to the organization.
Another less favorable implication of consumption philanthropy’s reliance on the purchasing
decisions of individual consumers is that it may disadvantage less attractive but nonetheless
worthy causes. Consider the many pink ribbon campaigns for breast cancer, for instance. Since
1991, when the first pink ribbon was handed out at the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Race for
the Cure, pink ribbons and products have flourished. Today, the Komen Foundation raises about
$30 million a year through 130 corporate partnerships.
The sheer volume of pink products seems to lead many consumers to believe that breast cancer is
the most pressing health problem facing women today. Yet the most recent (2004) data from the
3
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the leading cause of death among
women in the United States is heart disease, not breast cancer. And although cancer is the
leading cause of death for women ages 35-64, breast cancer is not the most common form of
cancer among women (skin cancer is), nor is it the leading cause of death among women
diagnosed with cancer (lung cancer holds this distinction). Because of the success of cause
marketing for breast cancer, however, breast cancer-related organizations receive attention that is
disproportionate to the scope of the disease.
As consumption philanthropy becomes ubiquitous, some observers worry that it may, in the long
run, have exactly the opposite of its intended effect and will desensitize the public to social ills
while decreasing other forms of philanthropic action. Accordingly, Matthew Berglind of
Northwestern University and Cheryl Nakata of the University of Illinois at Chicago write in a
2005 Business Horizons article: “It is not difficult to imagine cause-related marketing campaigns
interjecting themselves into the millions of purchase transactions that take place each day. In
response, people may simply tune out and say ‘no’ because they cannot process each and every
request, or because they believe they have already donated enough.” 8
Easy Virtue
One of the redeeming aspects of consumption philanthropy is that it makes philanthropy simple
and convenient. As I do every weekend at the grocery store, shoppers can protect the Earth,
promote world peace, and fund a network of otherwise unnamed charities without deviating from
their routines in the least. In this way, consumption philanthropy can contribute to a more
compassionate marketplace.
The other side of this easy virtue, however, is that it is too easy. Consumption philanthropy does
not allow people to exercise their moral core. Philanthropy originated in the Greek ideal of
philanthropos or “love of humankind.” According to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,
philanthropy allows people to enact the all-important virtues of generosity, benevolence,
kindness, compassion, justice, and reciprocity. Enacting these virtues, in turn, allows people to
develop their character, cultivate their human potential, and strengthen their moral fiber.
Can consumption philanthropy achieve these same ends? Probably not. 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. Instead, they need only to pursue
their shopping needs and wants. Indeed, the consumer-philanthropist may even enjoy a cost
savings for her seemingly virtuous effort. As a recent Project Red advertisement put it , “30
percent off for you, 5 percent to fight AIDS in Africa.” One could argue that consumption
philanthropy— especially if there is a charitable surcharge—represents effort, and the choice to
buy a “socially responsible” product represents intention, but there is very little sacrifice, if any,
required. And so consumption philanthropy becomes divorced from the experience of duty.
Perhaps a more disturbing feature of consumption philanthropy is that consumers need not be
aware of the supposed beneficiary of their actions. The morality of philanthropy comes from
acting for other people, according to scholars Warren Smith and Matthew Higgins.9 Acting for
other people, in turn, requires figuring out what they really need.
4
Yet consumption philanthropy sidesteps both this requirement and, more generally, contact with
people in need. For example, a person who uses a charity-licensed credit card to pay for an
expensive meal, and thereby sends a percentage of his purchase to a cause that fights hunger,
may no longer feel obligated to find out who is hungry or why they are hungry. Without this
knowledge, he may feel less empathy for poor people, and therefore less compelled to change the
conditions that caused their plight.
More broadly, 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.
Market Blindness
A third long-term negative consequence of consumption philanthropy is that it obscures the ways
that markets produce some of the very problems—physical, social, and environmental—that
philanthropy attempts to redress. In Pink Ribbons, Inc., Samantha King describes the paradox of
some pink ribbon products: labels on the outside that promote breast cancer awareness and
research, but chemicals on the inside that cause the disease in the first place. So consumers buy,
say, a $6 SpongeBob Pink Pants toy to help fight cancer, not realizing that this product—a
frivolous item—also likely creates the toxins and other environmental hazards that help cause
cancer.a
Consumption philanthropy seldom calls on consumers to question the labor that went into the
creation of these products. Do these allegedly responsible corporations pay their workers a living
wage? Do they create safe working conditions? Do they make fair contracts? Product Red may
be donating money to fight disease in Africa, but it isn’t doing enough to protect the workers
who make its products, says Bristol, U.K.-based nonprofit Labour Behind the Label. Although
Product Red partner Gap has worked diligently over the years to improve its ethical practices and
image, for instance, the apparel company still runs afoul of both international regulations and
activists: Two years ago, London’s Observer found children making Gap clothing in sweatshops
in India. Cause-marketing items may be no worse than ordinary products, but they appear to be
no better, either.
Finally, consumption philanthropy rarely questions the act of consuming or the environmental
havoc that more and more products wreak. Did the energy used to create that Endangered
Species Chocolate bar destroy another acre of rain forest, and therefore hasten the endangerment
of yet another species and the warming of the planet? Was that SpongeBob Pink Pants toy really
worth the petroleum—and the environmental degradation that came with extracting, refining,
and transforming it—that went into it? Rather than raising these questions about our purchases
and their consequences, consumption philanthropy encourages people to buy more by making
them feel better about it.
In short, consumption philanthropy lulls people into a false sense of doing good through their
purchases, even as they are potentially doing harm through their purchases. Indeed, in many
cases, consumption philanthropists are exacerbating the very harms they wish to reduce. At the
aA
year after this article was published, Komen teamed up with KFC to much criticism.
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same time, consumption philanthropy feeds the systems and institutions that contribute to many
social problems in the first place.
Meanwhile, because consumption and philanthropy have become one and the same, the distance
from which one would critique consumption and the market, and imagine alternatives, is
eliminated. Philanthropy becomes depoliticized, stripped of its critical, social change potential.
The result is that consumption philanthropy stabilizes, more than changes, the system (the
market) that some would argue led to the poverty, disease, and environmental destruction
philanthropists hope to eradicate. Consumption philanthropy is thus not about change, but about
business as usual.
Profit-Free Philanthropy
I cannot offer the solution to the problems of consumption philanthropy. But I hope at least to
offer a starting point for dialogue about unexamined assumptions and the political nature of
philanthropy. What are our assumptions and expectations of philanthropy? Should philanthropy
create social change? If so, what type of change?
If we are concerned about solving societal problems, reinvigorating the moral core of
philanthropy, and making markets protect—or at least not harm—human well-being, a market
approach cannot be an appropriate avenue for philanthropy. The most benevolent philanthropic
agenda would not be infused with consumption. Instead, it would give voice to those who suffer.
This may be the best way to create social change.
Why amplify the voices of those who suffer? As we have seen in movements for workers’ rights,
African-Americans’ civil rights, and women’s and gender rights in the United States, when the
aggrieved speak and the more powerful listen, policies, political processes, and public
perceptions can change. Social movements are one of the principal ways in which “collectivities
can give voice to their grievances and concerns about the rights, welfare, and well-being of
themselves and others.” 10 And social movements—such as the American Revolution and the
abolition of slavery—have brought about some of the most significant developments and
changes in hu…
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