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 cause-related 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 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.