‘Business 2.0′: Companies and Breast Cancer

Companies have helped raise millions of dollars for breast-cancer research and treatment in recent years, largely by promising to give a percentage of a product’s purchase price to charity, notes Business 2.0 (February). The cause, often symbolized by a pink ribbon or pink products — including a pink Kitchenaid mixer and Republic of Tea’s pink grapefruit tea blend — is especially popular, the magazine says, because women control many purchasing decisions, and “no woman is untouched: Everyone either has had the disease, fears she’ll get it, or knows someone who has.”

“The corporate embrace of the cause has spawned a lucrative market for companies eager to build valuable brand loyalty,” the magazine says. “Charity or not, this is a market with many of the features of elbows-out battling for share: turf struggles, digs at the competition, one-upmanship, and a fierce drive for results.”

As companies compete for the right to be known as the most-generous supporter of breast-cancer groups, activists and others are raising questions “about just whose purposes are being served, and how well,” the magazine says. “For one thing, the jockeying by so many companies to lash their images to breast cancer drains resources away from many other worthy causes, including other diseases that kill far more women. And while corporate marketing efforts have no doubt raised awareness of breast cancer, the packaging of the disease may have oversimplified some of the complex medical and social issues surrounding it, and even influenced the direction of research in potentially damaging ways.”

The campaigning by companies has angered some activists so much that they waged an ad campaign in October urging consumers to think carefully before buying products made by companies that promise to support breast-cancer research.

“Some good is being done,” Barbara Bremer, head of Breast Cancer Action, the San Francisco group that sponsored such advertisements, told Business 2.0. “But as a society, we have no idea how much good this really is doing, and we shouldn’t trust the companies to tell us. Their business is selling products.”

“Corporate America has conducted its breast-cancer fund raising and marketing in a way that is conservative and doesn’t really challenge basic tenets of medicine or American society,” Barron Lerner, an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and author of The Breast Cancer Wars, tells the magazine.

Nonetheless, leaders of other causes are envious of breast cancer’s corporate ties. Leslie Michelson, chief executive of Cap Cure, a prostate-cancer charity, is actively seeking to emulate the success of the breast-cancer cause in attracting corporate partners, calling such collaboration “an unalloyed good thing,” according to the magazine. Nicole Russo-Okamoto, communications director at AIDS Project Los Angeles, told Business 2.0, “We would love at this point to see a red ribbon on yogurt lids,” she says. “It gives you more credibility if a company like Ford is behind you.”

The article is available at http://www.business2.com.