The Ethics of Pink

There was an article this week in the Guardian online site regarding the use of October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the proliferation of pink products – or things temporarily give a pink package with the promise of donations made to various anti-cancer groups. One of the author’s points was that while the donations are all very well and good, most of the companies offering a temporary pink label are also using their participation in such programs as a marketing tool – the idea being that you will be more likely to purchase additional cartons of yoghurt, for example, if you think some of the proceeds are going to a good cause. The author – and a number of other Survivors I have known – would really prefer that you buy as much yoghurt (or whatever) as you were going to purchase anyway, and then donate the extra funds directly for anti-cancer research and treatment. I thought we should take a closer look at the question…

On the one hand, there is no doubt that some donations to anti-cancer groups are better than no funds, and any activity which helps lead to a cure – or even wider prevention and treatment – of this horrible disease is a good thing in my book. By the same token, it’s difficult to argue with additional awareness efforts. All charities and causes tend to get lost in the clutter of the hundreds (or thousands) of other agencies trying to raise funds for their particular issue, and having brightly-colored packages placed in public to remind people of your cause is certainly a good thing. If seeing a pink carton of dairy products reminds someone that people in their community needs help, and part of the sale price of those products is being donated to that cause, it’s difficult to see how the company taking part is doing anything wrong…

By the same token, however, it’s also difficult to argue that buying one carton of yoghurt to generate a 30-cent donation and then donating $3 directly is going to have more impact than buying two cartons and generating a 60-cent donation would. And if the company is donating 10% of their profits, not 10% of the purchase price, the actual impact of the product-purchase donation is going to be even smaller (12 cents versus $3.06 in the example given above). More to the point, perhaps, unless the company is donating more money than what they will be getting from the extra sales they can reasonably expect to make as part of the promotion, this whole exercise becomes a revenue-enhancement for the company, to say nothing of whatever future sales increases they may experience once consumers get used to using double portions of their product…

No reasonable person is going to expect a for-profit company not to pursue profits; as previously noted in this space, that is why companies exist in the first place, and their success can be demonstrated to have a positive effect on the quality of life experienced by their employees, their stockholders, and ultimately everyone else connected with them. But if one of these awareness month promotions involves spending $1,000 on an un-needed consumer product (the author’s example is a pair of pink shoes) to get a $50 donation, as opposed to buying a $200 pair of shoes and donating another $200 to anti-cancer research (and banking the rest for more important uses), then it’s hard to say if this is more to the benefit of the charity or the shoe company. Which leads me to the question:

Assuming that a for-profit company wants to contribute to anti-cancer research, treatment and awareness, do they have any ethical responsibility to ensure that any resulting uptick in sales does not benefit them more than it does the charities they support? Can they reasonably assume that a customer’s extra disposable income would have be donated to charity if it wasn’t spent on their product? If their pink promotion does result in higher donations to cancer-related charities than those same agencies would have had without the promotion, does it really matter if the company does well for itself out of the deal? Does our answer change if the company’s success allows them to offer better wages and better health coverage, allowing more of their employees to get appropriate screenings and treatment for cancer themselves? And in any case, where do we draw that line?

It’s worth thinking about…