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Abstract
The Product (RED) initiative was launched by Bono at Davos in 2006. Product RED is ‘a brand created to raise awareness and money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by teaming up with iconic brands to produce RED-branded products’. With the engagement of American Express, Apple, Converse, Gap, Emporio Armani, Hallmark and Motorola, consumers can help HIV/AIDS patients in Africa. They can do so simply by shopping, as a percentage of profits from Product (RED) lines goes to support the Global Fund. In this article we examine how the corporations that are part of this initiative use RED to build up their brand profiles, sell products and/or portray themselves as both ‘caring’ and ‘cool’. We also show that, more than simply being another example of cause-related marketing (like the pink ribbon campaign or the ubiquitous plastic armbands), RED engages corporations in profitable ‘helping’ while simultaneously pushing the agenda of corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards solving the problems of ‘distant others’.
Notes
The authors would like to thank Simon Bolwig, Padraig Carmody, Peter Gibbon, Sam Jones, Peter Kragelund, Peter Lund-Thomsen, Lone Riisgaard and Grahame Thompson for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
1 See the official RED website, at http://www.joinred.com.
2 We examine companies that had RED product lines as of 31 December 2007. In 2008 Dell, Microsoft and Starbucks also joined the group.
4 LA Richey & S Ponte, ‘Better RED™ than dead? Celebrities, consumption and international aid’, Third World Quarterly, 29 (4), 2008, pp 711–729.
5 See, among others, the special issues on CSR in this journal (28: 4) and in International Affairs (81: 3).
6 M Blowfield, ‘Reasons to be cheerful? What we know about CSR's impact’, Third World Quarterly, 28 (4), 2007, pp 683–695; and P Newell & JG Frynas, ‘Beyond CSR? Business, poverty and social justice: an introduction’, Third World Quarterly, 28 (4), 2007, pp 669–681.
7 http://www.joinred.com/you/calculator.asp, accessed 12 June 2008.
8 For example, see R Jenkins, ‘Globalization, corporate social responsibility and poverty’, International Affairs, 81 (3), 2005, pp 525–540.
9 The analysis carried out in this article relies on public availability of information. CSR activities are diverse, and companies clearly have strong incentives towards highly selective reporting of their CSR portfolio. Many companies are reporting explicitly labelled CSR activities as a way to gain credit for activities in which they may have been engaging for some time, particularly those aimed at increasing the morale of their employees, but not getting any credit from their other stakeholders—particularly consumers. Interestingly, however, while the incentives not to report failures are obvious, there may also be perverse incentives not to report certain kinds of successes that could raise objections from Wall Street. One reason for this is that bragging may inspire others to attack your failures. All the data analysed here are from publicly available sources, including reports written by advocacy NGOs, company CSR reports, press releases and trade magazines. Attempts to obtain primary data on RED products through phone interviews with the seven companies and the RED initiative headquarters were, with a few exceptions, unsuccessful. Questions about which companies release what information, to whom, how and when are beyond the scope of this article; however, it would be naïve to disregard the limitations of the public data.
10 We owe the idea of using such a matrix to Grahame Thompson.
11 SL Wartick & PL Cochran, ‘The evolution of the corporate social performance model’, Academy of Management Review, 10 (4), 1985, pp 758–769.
12 AB Carroll, ‘Corporate social responsibility: evolution of a definitional construct’, Business & Society, 38 (3), 1999, pp 268–295.
14 For example, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development uses the following definition: ‘Corporate Social Responsibility is the continuing commitment by business to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as of the local community and society at large’. R Holmes & P Watts, Corporate Social Responsibility: Making Good Business Sense, Geneva: World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 2000, p 8.
15 According to Grahame Thompson, ‘corporate citizenship’ is based on a ‘citizenship of acts’, which emphasises active involvement in the public sphere where agents can ‘pick and choose which aspects of citizenly behaviours they wish to uphold or stress’. G Thompson, ‘Tracking global corporate citizenship: some reflections on “lovesick” companies’, mimeo, Copenhagen Business School, 2008, p 2. Such an approach is in line with the voluntary nature of CSR, but tends to obfuscate another approach to citizenship, one based on ‘status’ and highlighting ‘rights and obligations determined within the context of a definite polity’. Lacking enforcement mechanisms and a clear legal basis, ‘corporate citizenship’ is not exercised, but rather performed. Such performance takes place within the legitimising boundaries of semi-institutionalised frameworks (the UN Global Compact, or the World Economic Forum, where RED was launched), through enabling and learning networks, CSR conferences, ‘how to’ manuals and with the engagement of specialised consultants. M McIntosh, S Waddock & G Kell, Learning to Talk: Corporate Citizenship and the Development of the UN Global Compact, Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing, 2004; and Thompson, ‘Tracking global corporate citizenship’.
16 See McKinsey, ‘The state of corporate philanthropy: a McKinsey global survey’, February 2008, at http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/PDFDownload.aspx?L2=21&L3=37&ar=2106.
17 M di Leonardo, ‘Introduction: new global and American landscapes of inequality’, in JL Collins, M di Leonardo & B Williams (eds), New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America, Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008.
18 RE Freeman & J Liedtka, ‘Corporate social responsibility: a critical approach—corporate social responsibility no longer a useful concept’, Business Horizons, 34 (4), 1991, pp 92–98.
19 P Frumkin, Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006, p 8.
20 Milton Friedman, ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’, New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970. See also Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
21 T Levitt, ‘The dangers of social responsibility’, Harvard Business Review, 36, 1958, pp 41–50.
22 GP Lantos, ‘The boundaries of strategic corporate social responsibility’, Journal of Consumer Marketing, 18 (7), 2001, pp 595–632.
23 Jenkins, ‘Globalization, corporate social responsibility and poverty’.
24 RE Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, Boston, MA: Pitman/Ballinger, 1984. The focus on the ‘business case’ for CSR is not without its critics. Michael Jensen claims that CSR fails because it does not provide a ‘corporate objective function’ of business, and provides too many variables for managers to juggle. M Jensen, ‘Value maximization, stakeholder theory, and the corporate objective function’, The Monitor Company, Harvard Business School and Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College, 2001. A different criticism of the business case focuses on the willingness and eagerness of CSR discourse to adopt the language and stance of the business community. In this context stakeholder theory can be seen as a way of replacing genuine social responsibility with simple profit calculation. See Jenkins ‘Globalization, corporate social responsibility and poverty’; P Newell, ‘Citizenship, accountability, and community: the limits of the CSR agenda’, International Affairs, 81 (3), 2005, pp 541–557; and M Prieto-Carron, P Lund-Thomsen, A Chan, A Muro & C Bhushan, ‘Critical perspectives on CSR and development: what we know, what we don't know, and what we need to know’, International Affairs, 82 (5), 2006, pp 977–987.
25 S King, Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
26 M Blowfield & JG Frynas, ‘Setting new agendas: critical perspectives on corporate social responsibility in the developing world’, International Affairs, 81 (3), 2005, p 512, point out that this approach among companies continues today.
27 M Berglind & C Nakata, ‘Cause-related marketing: more buck than bang?’, Business Horizons, 48 (3), 2005, p 443.
28 American Express's campaign for the renovation of the Statue of Liberty in the early 1980s generated a 27% increase in card use and a 10% increase in new card membership applications, in addition to raising $1.7 million for the cause. King, Pink Ribbons, Inc, p 11. To achieve this, American Express spent $6 million promoting its Statue of Liberty Campaign and ‘announced its good works with authority and fanfare, making a break with the humbler philanthropy of the past, and in direct response to the public's raised consciousness. The genius of this campaign was recognizing that the marketplace would reward firms that acted in a socially responsible way and that assisted ordinary citizens to act responsibly too’. Berglind & Nakata, ‘Cause-related marketing’, p 446.
29 Berglind & Nakata, ‘Cause-related marketing’, p 446.
30 King, Pink Ribbons, Inc, p 9.
31 Berglind & Nakata, ‘Cause-related marketing’, p 448.
32 Bill Lauberis, quoted in King, Pink Ribbons Inc, p 11.
33 See S Ponte, LA Richey & M Baab, ‘Bono's product (RED) initiative: wedding hard commerce and corporate social responsibility’, DIIS Working Paper 13, Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2008.
34 For the methodology used in the Business Ethics magazine ranking, see http://www.business-ethics.com/BE100_all.
35 Berglind & Nakata, ‘Cause-related marketing’, p 450.
36 M Frazier, ‘Bono & Co spend up to $100 million on marketing, incur watchdogs’ wrath’, Advertising Age, March 2007.
37 Similarly, Joss Stone also donated 100% of the profits of her latest music video to RED.
39 The main controversial Africa link for Motorola has to do with coltan, a metallic ore that is used to make capacitors, a component of mobile phones. Coltan is found in large quantities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and its illegal mining and selling is said to be one of the financing mechanisms used by various factions in the ongoing conflict in the country. Motorola has recently declared that it has stopped buying coltan from that region. Motorola, 2006 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, p10, at http://www.motorola.com/mot/doc/6/6801_MotDoc.pdf.
40 Louise Story, ‘Want to help treat AIDS in Africa? Buy a cellphone’, New York Times, 4 October 2006, at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/business/media/04adco.html?ei=5070&en=b675eeeb5d1856&ex=1182139200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1182002688-tjdhssxLUSINvXWwLAX0DA.
41 Video, RED product launch at Davos, viewed at http://www.joinred.com.
42 JC Welsh, ‘Good cause, good business’, Harvard Business Review, 77 (1), 1999, pp 1–3.
43 King, Pink Ribbons, Inc.
44 ‘Bono bets on red to battle aids’, BBC News, 26 January 2006, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4650024.stm.
45 See Richey & Ponte, ‘Better RED™ than dead?.