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 website. 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 cause-related marketing or cause marketing, consumption philanthropy pairs the support of a charitable cause with the purchase or promotion of a service or product. (See “Flavors of Consumption Philanthropy” on page 53 for a description of the types of cause marketing.)

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 individualizes 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 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 cause-related 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.”